[Okular-devel] Kile and Okular with ForwardDVI

[Thomas Braun]

On Mittwoch 13 Mai 2009, Pino Toscano wrote:

Hi Pino,

> > With KDE 3.5 kile used to call kdvi like
> > kdvi --unique 'file:/home/kdedev/kile-projects/test.dvi#src:16
> > ./test.tex' and kdvi jumped to the source special "#src: 16./test.tex" in
> > the file /home/kdedev/kile-projects/test.dvi.
>
> Aha.
>
> > With okular this method does not work anymore.
>
> Actually, this was not implemented so far (that's why it does not work).

Thats of course a good reason.

> > Have you already added forward search in okular?
> > If yes, how do I have to call okular in order to get it working?
>
> It is not there yet.
> Incidentally, we received a bug report about named destinations for PDF
> documents, which we don't handle correctly.
> Fixing this bug (for which I need to ask permission to add one string,
> though) would basically add a -a/--anchor <name> parameter for the Okular
> shell (or, if you have better names, they would be welcome), that would
> allow to jump to the specified named destination. This way, you would just
> need to do: $ okular some.dvi --anchor 'src:16 ./test.tex'

Sounds good. An alternative name could be --source-reference/ -s but --anchor 
is also good.

> As said, this will come as a consequence of a bugfix for PDFs, so it will
> need a small addition in the DVI backend (the actual resolution of the
> named destination to a viewport in the current document). I really hope to
> have this in KDE 4.3.

Me too.

> Furthermore, there's something that I would like to improve regarding the
> okularpart <-> embedders interaction with source references (ie "please
> open the source file foo.xxx, at line Y and column Z). This could be useful
> for Frescobaldi as well.
> Currently, when the user uses Kile and wants to have source links being
> opened with Kile when reading a PDF within Kile, the current way is "go to
> the Okular settings and set Kile as editor" (same as with KDVI).
> One of the possible idea to improve this would be having the okularpart
> emitting a signal like:
>   void sourceReferenceRequest(QString source, int row, int column, bool&
> open) this way, you could just connect to such signal of the okularpart
> instance, and in case you want to handle a request of source reference, you
> would set the open reference to true, and then handle it yourself.
> If true, Okular would then stop there, and don't go further with the editor
> invocation.
> If false, Okular would go ahead just like now.
>
> What do you think?

So if I understand you correct the idea is that the okularpart says "I have a 
source reference here" and all editors can then do the appropriate actions, 
or?
This sounds good for an embedded part but I don't know if it works also good 
for a standalone okular.
For a standalone okular kile would have to poll the dbus system for an okular 
application, and if it finds one, then wait for a okular signal as a 
standalone okular might not been opened from within kile. Or is there an 
easier way?

And if we do it vice versa?
Let okular search for kile/frescobaldi/etc. on dbus and tell them with a dbus 
method call sourceReferenceRequest(QString source, int row, int column, bool& 
open). Then the editors can decide what do do.
And for all non-dbus enabled application okular still provides the "editor 
settings" configure options.
The disadvantige here is that okular would have to have a list of applications 
implementing this dbus interface and this is not so nice.

bye,
thomas