[sugar] Viewing PDFs from Browse

[Gary C Martin]

On 12 Oct 2008, at 00:26, Sayamindu Dasgupta wrote:

> I was thinking along similar terms, and here's the screenshot of the
> latest version:
> http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/pdf_embed/Screenshot.png
>
> To get this in your own XO (I used this on a clean install of 767),
> download the install the following two RPMs:
>
> http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/pdf_embed/m4-1.4.10-3.fc9.i386.rpm

I had a minor warning here, but otherwise the installs seems to have  
worked well:

[olpc at xo-05-24-02 ~]$ sudo rpm --install m4-1.4.10-3.fc9.i386.rpm
install-info: No such file or directory for /usr/share/info/m4.info

> http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/pdf_embed/mozplugger-1.10.1-4.olpc3.i386.rpm
>
> The viewer has to be downloaded from
> http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/pdf_embed/sugar-pdf-viewer.gz, put in
> /usr/bin, decompressed, and then made executable.
>
> If you click on a link to any PDF file in Browse after this, you
> should get the PDF embedded in the Browse window itself.

Yes, this is great, another big UI improvement!

Now, I did go right for the map pdf content and start zooming way in  
and scrolling around, so I quickly bogged my XO down in CPU and  
memory, but that's just the same as would happen in Read anyway :-)  
Maybe my eyes are cheating me, but the text on the map seems much  
sharper when zoomed in with your new inline pdf viewer, in Read the  
text seemed to get a little softer (like a heavy AA).

I noticed that at start and after a change in zoom, you get very quick  
visual zoom in/out, but if you watch sugar-pdf-viewer (or Read if you  
do the same there) you'll see the process try and hog 100% CPU for  
perhaps 10-20sec (depends on zoom level and pdf size etc). Scrolling  
at this time is obviously painful, I'm assuming it's doing some kind  
of background render of the entire page – hoping to finish the whole  
page before you start scrolling? Just an observation. I wonder if the  
busy wait cursor could be triggered until the hidden background  
grinding has completed so the user has a visual indication that  
something is still working away?

> You can also put the PDFs in the Journal if you want - the "Keep"  
> feature seems to
> work for both local and remote PDF files.


Yes, keep worked for me here, though it gave me a Journal entry called  
803304.ai when I kept the europe.pdf from the WorldFactBookMaps  
bundle. The 803304.ai entry did open correctly in Read by default when  
I clicked it – just thought the name was a little odd.

What with this and your light weight image viewer, you're really  
smoothing off some sharp UI corners, for me at least :-)

Great work!
--Gary