[Okular-devel] Advice about adding functionality to Okular

[Albert Astals Cid]

El Wednesday 25 November 2015, a les 10:24:34, Jonathan Schultz va escriure:
> Hi Albert,
> 
> > What do you mean "code that section"?
> 
> Sorry - I should have explained what Qualitative Data Analysis refers to
> by 'code'. What it means is to 'tag' a document section by associating
> with a 'code' that is in turn linked to an externally maintained
> database of codes with their own properties. The goal is to allow the
> data analyst to perform complex queries on libraries of documents that
> return the matching sections from those documents.

What you want is not what Okular is, Okular is a document viewer with very 
minor editing functionality.

Your use case, while valid is very specialized and I think noone else would 
probably need it, so I would probably not accept a patch for Okular. Accepting 
your patch would give me the burden of having to maintain that code forever 
and make both the UI and code more complex.

Not all is lost.

Okular is composed of two parts, a KPart and the Shell, the KPart contains 
almost all the logic and you can embed it into any program you code (that use 
KParts technologies).

My suggestion is that you code your own program using the Okular KPart + 
interfaces, gives you much more freedom on how you want to organize your UI, 
etc.

Most probably the Okular KPart interfaces do not provide everything you need 
to code what you want, but improving the interfaces is much less of a problem 
that adding all that code to Okular.

Hope I made sense.

Cheers,
  Albert

> 
> Cheers,
> Jonathan
> 
> > Cheers,
> > 
> >    Albert
> >> 
> >> The actual codes and coded sections would be dealt with through
> >> an abstraction layer so that eventually different back-ends could handle
> >> them.
> >> 
> >> Although this functionality bears some resemblance to the 'Annotations'
> >> currently available, it seems different enough to me to warrant being
> >> implemented separately.
> >> 
> >> So, what it seems to me I need to do is:
> >> 
> >> 1. Add an item to the pull-down menus to en-/dis-able the coding
> >> functionality.
> >> 
> >> 2. Add an item to the context menu that appears when a selection has
> >> been made that would summon a coding dialog. (Perhaps some shortcuts for
> >> commonly performed actions could be directly on the menu, that's a small
> >> detail).
> >> 
> >> 3. Add a new tab to the Navigation panel for visualising the coded
> >> sections in the document, and write the code for displaying that panel.
> >> 
> >> 4. Extend the document rendering to indicate (via shading or such-like)
> >> the sections that have been coded.
> >> 
> >> None of this seems so complicated to be beyond my powers of reverse
> >> engineering, but that might be my naivety speaking! So I thought I'd ask
> >> whether anyone had any advice for Okular development newcomers.
> >> Specifically, is there any 'correct' way to add functionality of this
> >> kind to Okular? And any other suggestions would be most appreciated.
> >> 
> >> Finally if anyone is interested in where I want to take this project,
> >> I'd be more than happy to share.
> >> 
> >> Thanks in advance,
> >> 
> >> Jonathan
> >> 
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Okular-devel mailing list
> >> Okular-devel at kde.org
> >> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/okular-devel
> > 
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> 
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