UX suggestions for tabletReader

[Inge Wallin]

On Wednesday, May 02, 2012 22:42:55 Bogdan Cristea wrote:
> On Wednesday 02 May 2012 22:25:24 Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
> > > I would never propose it for PDF reading. Poppler and the rest of the
> > > Okular libraries is probably perfect for that.
> > > 
> > >  To be honest, I'm not that familiar with the internals of ebook
> > >  readers but>
> > > 
> > > there is one thing that struck me when I read about the epub format:
> > > It's
> > > intended to be relayouted on the fly for different screen sizes or
> > > orientations (landscape / portrait).
> > > 
> > > The Calligra office engine can do that quite efficiently on even
> > > thousand
> > > pages long documents but I don't know if the Okular engine can do it.
> > > My impression was that okular is mostly for fixed formats where the
> > > page is fixed as is is and cannot change.  But that impression could
> > > be wrong of course.
> > 
> > Ah okay, that makes sense :). I don't have any experience with ebooks, so
> > I don't know how well the Okular libraries handle them. However, reading
> > PDFs is probably at least as important a usecase as ebooks for our
> > reader. So in case the Calligra Words engine actually handles ebooks
> > better than Okular, it would make sense to use different backends for
> > the two file types. @Bogdan: Would that be possible for your reader?
> 
> Everything is possible, but I need to know in what format the data to be
> displayed is presented by the backend. Currently only pixmaps are used,
> even if for chm is not the most efficient way.

(Hmm, what is chm?)

There are several ways forward possible: 

1. You can use the Calligra backend as it is and just add a new UI to it. I 
guess that starting with Calligra Active would be very simple.  It loads and  
displays files very well, and is fast to use.

2. If you want to use an already existing Ui you can look at how the 
presentation program Stage is used as a page provider for Okular. There is 
already code to do that today and I guess that doing something similar for 
text documents would be pretty straight forward.

In both these cases somebody would have to create a file format filter from 
epub to odt, the open document text format. The Calligra Words engine itself 
reads and writes only odt. I don't know how complex the epub format is but I 
know that writing a filter for Calligra is pretty easy.