[Kde-graphics-devel] KPdf evolution

[Wilfried Huss]

Am Sunday, 13. February 2005 18:56 schrieb Enrico Ros:
> - How can be a new generation EBOOK reader (yes, 'cause kpdf can support
> many formats, not only pdf, despite of its name) ??

As you may know KViewShell has the same goal. While its development 
stagnated for a few years, Stefan Kebekus and myself started working on it 
again last summer.
The main goal for KDE 3.4 was to cleanly separate KViewShell from KDVI. 

In KViewShell the fileformat plugins are KParts which are now loaded on demand 
at runtime. Each plugin can add its own menu items and configuration options 
to the interface. 

The plugins are also designed in a way to allow them to be embeded into other
applications like Kile for example. This is still not complete, but we aim at 
something similar to the KTextEditor or KMediaPlayer interfaces.

For an universal EBook-Reader it also has to be possible to implement
special features which the different fileformats support. KDVI for example 
allows to jump from a DVI-document to the corresponding line in its 
TeX-source, and vice verse.

I've created a list of what I think are the relative strengths of the two 
programs. Since I haven't looked too close at the code of KPDF this list 
might be not completly correct.

KPDF:
* Asyncronous page generation.
* Support for accessibility features.
* Better rendering code.
* Flickerfree and more smooth display.
* Presentation mode.
* Search function works better.

KViewShell:
* Better page layout with 4 different viewmodes. (Different papersizes
   per document are not supported yet, since dvi doesn't support them.)
* Loading of compressed files.
* Guessing of filename extensions. Very convinient when working with LaTeX
  on the commandline.
* More refined code to fit pages to the viewport. Works in all viewmodes and
  scrollbars are only enabled when necessary.
* More refined API for the fileformat plugins (as explained above).
* Text selection works like in a text editor.

I hope we can combine our efforts for KDE4 since two generic document
viewers are overkill for KDE, and in my opinion both KPDF and KDVI could
gain a lot in the process.

Greetings,
Wilfried.