[Okular-devel] Wishlist: Ideas for Okular development - by a wannabe developer

[Navneet Sankara]

Hi

I wasn't sure if this mail belonged in the Okular Development mailing list.
So I had sent a personal mail to Pino first, which I didn't get any reply
to. I am an avid user of your software and I have a few ideas for additional
functionality that Okular could provide, which would greatly improve its
usability for me, personally, and possibly for other users too. Here are
some :

1. Additional functionality for annotations in PDF files : Default values of
opacity, width, font size, etc should be adjustable. Another thing I find
very annoying is that Highlighting is not possible neatly in a 2-column
file. Is it not possible to figure out that a file is in 2-column format
(some hack like looking for a vertical line of blank space, maybe?) and
adapt the Highlighting feature accordingly?

2. This should be simple: just a "Back" button in the navigation toolbar (at
the bottom of the window) so that it's easy to go back after you've clicked
on a link (a hyper-reference in a pdf file).

3. Library management : Would it be possible to have a management of files
on the personal computer from within Okular? I am a budding researcher and I
find this tool <http://www.zotero.org/> (Zotero) very useful to manage all
the papers that I have on my HD. It would be useful to have this
functionality from within Okular (much the same as Amarok manages my music,
for example). Along with the annotation tool, this would greatly improve the
usability for researchers (and for other users as well?). It would need a
way to parse citations and download the papers automatically. Another useful
feature would be a snapshot of links in files, in particular, links within
the file. For example, if you could see a snapshot of an equation, a
publication reference (just the citation at the end of the paper, say) or a
figure when a reference to the item occurs in the file. This would need a
lot of indexing and OCR, I would imagine. I think some of this is present in
a proprietary software for Mac users called Papers<http://mekentosj.com/papers/>
.

I understand that quite a few of the ideas above may be hard to implement
and will probably take a long time to complete. But I would like to know if
any development is going on in that direction. The recent development news
in the mailing list didn't seem to indicate that.

I am an undergrad EE student with some programming experience, but no
software development (nothing >1500 lines of code!). I would be interested
in joining the development team to help with these aspects, if possible. Is
there a large barrier to entry, in terms of size of code or lack of
experience?

Hoping for a prompt reply
Navneet Sankara
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