[Bookreader] [Sugar-devel] Making Read read everything [WAS: Re: FBReader]

[Morgan Collett]

On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 00:16, Sayamindu Dasgupta <sayamindu at gmail.com> wrote:
> [Summarizing and cleaning up the cruft of the older discussions]
>
> Hello all,
> Currently, we have a number of ways to read ebooks (which includes a
> variety of formats, starting from plaintext to PDF to archived HTML in
> the form of epub, etc).. We have Read - which handles PDFs, DJVU, CBZ,
> PS, etc. We have ReadEtext, which does a nice job with text files, and
> the latest addition to the lot is an somewhat experimental activity
> based on FBReader[1][2].
>
> SJ and I were wondering if it may make sense to try to unify these
> activities in some way, so that the "Read" activity in Sugar can
> handle all formats (going by the "verbs" concept that is central to
> the Sugar concept). While the most elegant way to do this would be
> perhaps to have dynamic backends for Read, which would be loaded on
> demand, based on the format of the file being opened, this would be a
> non trivial exercise. (to begin with, for example, there are subtle
> differences with respect to pagination for different formats: eg,
> PDF/DJVU offers a very clear distinction between pages, while this can
> be quite flexible, or even non existent for a plain text file)
>
> Is there a easier way we can do this ? SJ suggests that we rename the
> existing the Read activity to something else (ReadPDF ??) and then use
> some kind of "wrapper activity" to launch the relevant activity as and
> when required. Will this be useful/possible ?
>
> Thanks,
> Sayamindu

Hi Sayamindu

I don't have time to actively maintain Read at the moment. I've added
"sayaminfu" (?) as a committer.

FWIW I don't have a strong opinion on which approach to take - "show
me the code"... as long as packaging the result for distros doesn't
require non-upstream stuff.

Regards
Morgan