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

[Navneet Sankara]

Thank you all. I do apologize for repeating bug-reports that seem to have
already
been there... I didn't see any of them in a search, so I just went ahead.

I'll definitely take a look at the source and see if I can start tinkering
with it. Thanks for all the encouragement!

Navneet


On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 4:14 PM, Pino Toscano <pino at kde.org> wrote:

> 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.
>
> Sorry for not having replied earlier, but given that your email was quite
> long
> and not the only one to reply in (limited) time, I started writing bits for
> its reply offline.
>
> > 1. Additional functionality for annotations in PDF files : Default values
> > of opacity, width, font size, etc should be adjustable.
>
> Ok.
>
> > 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?
>
> If it would have been easy it was there already ;) This is reported already
> as
> bug #161324.
> Basically, the work is figuring out how to layout the text entities we have
> (each text character+its position in the page), recognizing also things
> like
> "²" (which have a bounding box slightly up wrt the other ones in the same
> "text line"), etc.
>
> > 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).
>
> This was bug #192143 already.
>
> > 3. Library management : Would it be possible to have a management of
> files
> > on the personal computer from within Okular?
>
> As written in the bug report, we decided time ago to not going this route.
> The reasons are various: adding those functionalities inside Okular is
> simply
> overloading a viewer with stuff which don't belong to it. Also, given that
> Okular provides a KDE KPart (okularpart), it is fairly easy (~5 LOC) to
> load
> and embed it in any KDE application.
> That said, we encourage any external application doing that, and using the
> okularpart for allowing the user to view documents.
>
> > 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.
>
> Loading external links is not cheap, so this might not feel "smooth".
> There's
> also the privacy concern, ie somebody could know you are reading a document
> because you are hovering a link and downloading another document/file from
> the
> Internet.
> For links to local pages, there's bug #128434 (originally for KPDF, which I
> just moved, as KPDF will not have it anyway).
>
> > 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?
>
> Theorically there's no "large barrier"; although being "big" (even if not
> that
> much, actually), Okular' source code is more or less "divided" into various
> parts, for example the core library, the ui parts for
> viewing/annotating/forms/etc. Of course some components show their
> complexity
> (like the Document, the PageView - which is more than 4k LOC -), but I'd
> say
> that generally the trick should be understanding first the system behind
> page
> generation and visualization. Once understood that, allthe other pieces can
> be
> (more or less) easily related to it.
>
> --
> Pino Toscano
>
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