[OLPC library] questions about PDFs

[S Page]

Sayamindu Dasgupta wrote:

> [lots of nifty plans for Read]

That's great and undoubtedly worthwhile for legacy documents, but to 
quote Shakespeare, "I come to bury page representations like PDF, not 
request enhancements unto them".  Nobody is contesting my argument that 
HTML in a browser whups PDF upside the head six ways to Sunday; 
therefore the aim of OLPC library advocates should be to get content as 
HTML (and encourage the advanced canvas, CSS, JavaScript and SVG that 
Browse/Firefox 3 supports), rather than making hundreds of thousands of 
kids who will never print from their XO look at "page representations".

> 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.

That would indeed solve a lot of download-journal-launch issues, and 
maybe the OOM problem when zooming in Read (trac 7090 and 6002).  As you 
probably know, the evince team's position is that rather than provide a 
plug-in, users should use mozplugger (http://mozplugger.mozdev.org/) to 
run the evince app within the browser.  I tried `su -l; yum install 
mozplugger; yum install evince`, but evince wants to install dozens of 
other packages.
I wonder when someone will write a PDF parser in JavaScript rendering to 
<canvas> or Cairo.

> Some backends which are experimental and are not
> enabled in our builds include ones for impress files, dvi files, and
> whatnot :-).

Wiki pages like http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image_file_formats say that 
DjVu is the best of these, and Chris Marshal on devel list cared about 
it.  Every time I look at the samples at http://djvu.org/docs/ , either 
Browse or Read crashes unless I remember to zoom out (trac 6223). 
Interesting, but I would defer all such bugs until some deployment cares.

Sincerely yours (I'm a nice person so long as nobody gives me a link to 
a PDF ;-)  )
--
=S Page