[Okular-devel] Improving the book reading experience with KDE tech

[Inge Wallin]

In just a few weeks Calligra 2.6 will be released, and with that the first 
version of Calligra Author. The first version of Author will be very like 
Words but it has a focus on the needs of a book writer rather than, say, a 
report writer or a memo writer. Therefore we expect Words and Author to start 
to diverge in the feature set soon.

Version 2.6 of Calligra Author has support for creating ebooks in EPUB2 and 
MOBI formats. Both of these formats are rather simple and support text with 
various formatting and pictures. Okular has a generator for EPUB which makes 
it a decent basic ebook reader.

However, Calligra Author 2.7 will start producing EPUB3 files which are much 
more complex. I want Author to become *the* way to create teaching materials 
with dynamic contents (animations, multimedia, etc) but most of that will be 
meaningless if there is no way to read the generated files. EPUB3 is huge so 
Author 2.7 will start out by supporting embedded videos and embedded math 
formulas using MathML.

And this is where Okular falls short. The current generator does not support 
more than very basic formatting and math formulas is not part of that. And the 
whole API of Okular does not support anything but static content. In the long 
run, this lack will diminish the value of Plasma Active and therefore I have 
also added the Active ML as a recipient.

Call to action
-------------------

I would like to put together a small task force to enhance Okular with a 
better generator for EPUB as well as enhance the general engine to also allow 
dynamic contents. The first version should support video but in the future i 
can easily imagine other things like embedded scripted animations or 3D 
objects in X3Dom and so on.

I have looked at the code of Okular and it looks entirely doable. I could 
probably manage myself but then there would be no other work on Calligra 
Author for the 2.7 cycle and that would be bad.

I think this is an important task for PA4 and therefore Okular Active.

Any takers?

	-Inge