About Calligra Active and what it should intend to be

[Friedrich W. H. Kossebau]

Hi,

may I give a comment as outsider on the issue (also cross-posting okular-
devel, please follow-ups only to calligra-devel at kde.org)

Mardi, le 4 octobre 2011, à 08:58, Inge Wallin a écrit:
> On Monday, October 03, 2011 16:24:21 Vít Pelčák wrote:
> > 2011/10/3 Shantanu Tushar Jha <jhahoneyk at gmail.com>:
> > > Hi,
> > > 
> > > (Cross posting as the topic might be of interest to both MLs)
> > > 
> > > There was recently some discussion on the Active ML about Calligra
> > > Active and how to make the user experience better.
> > > Aaron Seigo had an interesting suggestion in the mail he sent [1] 
which
> > > says-
> > > 
> > > "
> > > but imho the most important thing is for these
> > > projects to focus on being amazing document _viewers_.
> > > "
> > 
> > I thought, Okular is for that. Why should I have Calligra installed?
> > What is advantage? To have bazilion of viewers each being able to open
> > only specific document?
> 
> Okular can show lots of formats, including odt actually, but it cannot 
show
> ods, odp, odg or the other open document formats.  And, frankly, odt is 
not
> shown well.
> 
> So when you have a real document, either in the open document format or 
in
> a microsoft office format, then Calligra is necessary.

Hm, but then for a real paged-document-type viewer Calligra again would 
miss to support all the many other formats that Okular has plugins for, 
besides PDF ;)
Just see http://okular.kde.org/formats.php (maybe even outdated)

I wonder if somebody has not already started to instead write a Okular 
plugin which uses Calligra Core to load and render all the od* formats? 
Which would be what I would expect to happen, after all Okular (Desktop) 
has been designed for document consumption, both in features and in UI.
(No idea about the transitions which odp could ask for. Either Okular 
could get extended for that, or complicated transitions will just be 
ignored.)
Or are there technical reasons which block that?

Yes, would be another level of dependency. Simply a pity.

Which gives me this idea:
Perhaps Okular could become part of Calligra, being the 
"consumption/viewer UI" for paged-document-type formats, and your 
envisioned tablet/handheld UI would simply be the Okular Tablet/Okular 
Handheld variants.

As it is now I see conflicts arising, because Calligra is going to hunt in 
the solution space Okular is currently in (not that Okular is not used to 
that, it once started to hunt in that space itself while there was already 
an "default" provider from KDE, Ligature or whatever it was renamed to in 
its final days).
Some might say competition might be fruitful. Still, I rather see this as 
a good occasion for cooperation, instead of duplication/competition. 
Because competition (without friendly communication) might lead to bitter 
feelings, as it happened with the Ligature developers, which better is not 
repeated. And the user experience will also suck if there will be 
different programs started for PDF and e.g. EPub on a tablet.

BTW: Having done a few picture slideshows recently, I am enforced in 
seeing much of duplication wrt to picture slides showing and Okular 
features. Perhaps there could be some reuse/standards/components as well 
(perhaps a slideshow description format which would be created on the fly 
and passed to Okular from any image organizing program, where Okular again 
has a load&render plugin based on Gwenview or whatever provides a good 
image load&render lib. That slideshow format could also be saved as normal 
files, so Okular could be the default handler for that format and just do 
the presentation if you start a runner for that file)
And things are really in a continuum: an animated presentation show (odp) 
without stops (think of an animation of a factory flow) again is similar 
to a movie, is kind of a real-time rendered movie. So the controls in the 
UI and the handling/appearance better are consistent as well, to ease the 
user. Hm, did I just propose to merge Dragon Player and Okular? :P (to be 
honest, I am mildly serious there, but in a component-oriented way)

Thanks for attention and taking into account perhaps.

Cheers
Fried-not going to help with code for that for now-rich