[Okular-devel] Advice about adding functionality to Okular

[Jonathan Schultz]

Hi Albert,

Yes to be sure I agree that this is quite a specialised extension and 
would expect the responsibility to be mine to maintain it for 
compatibility with future versions of Okular. That said, I would 
obviously like to do the work in such a way as to minimise the 
difficulty of this future maintenance. Your answer gives me some 
indication of how I might go about this so I will take it from there for 
now. Thanks for your help.

Cheers,
Jonathan


On 25/11/15 11:14, Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> 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
>>>>
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>>>
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