[OLPC library] questions about PDFs

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

Hi,

On Sat, Sep 27, 2008 at 3:48 AM, Samuel Klein <sj at laptop.org> wrote:
> A few notes on books:
>
> please check out the latest wikibooks bundle in
> [[Collections/G1G1/8.2]] -- unfortunately, those are still pdf's.
> This should change for the next release, hopefully in time for 8.2.1.
>
> Josh Gay has just updated the textbookrevolution.org site -- take a look!
>
> HTML books : better tools are needed for neatly-formatted html export
> from various raw formats.  Mediawiki, pdf, doc, and plaintext are four
> of them.
>
> epub and similar books : We also need a bookreader that can parse
> modern epub formats.  "Read", having claimed the default verb, needs
> to address this -- even if that means no longer simply being evince in
> a candy coating.
>
> Sayamindu is picking up maintainership of read, and as 8.2 heads out
> the door I'm sure he'd appreciate these and other ideas and
> suggestions :-)
>

A small correction: Morgan is maintaining Read for now (atm, he's
concentrating more on the sharing aspects of Read, from what I
understand). Of course, that does not mean I'm not helping him out - I
just submitted a patch which implements ToC support in Read
(http://dev.laptop.org/attachment/ticket/2837/read_toc.png). As for
other formats, Read can support it via Evince, as long as we have a
backend for that. Some backends which are experimental and are not
enabled in our builds include ones for impress files, dvi files, and
whatnot :-).

I agree that the current process to handle PDFs downloaded from Browse
sucks. I am wondering if I can use the evince library that we are
shipping to implement a small and effiecient mozilla plugin, so that
the PDF can be directly viewed from within the Browser itself. Of
course, we'll need to see the possible memory usage issues arising out
of this as well.

Currently my TODO for Read include

a) ToC support (done)
b) Bookmarks support
c) Usability enhancements (like having sensible zoom levels by default
all the time, and updating those as the screen is rotated, etc)
d) Having a sane tablet mode

Thanks,
Sayamindu



-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]