Evince and OLPC



Hi everyone,

I'm new to the list and working as an intern for OLPC, who are developing the $100 laptop. The XO (as the machine is called) will probably be used as an e-book reader extensively. The software running on this laptop has a completely redesigned UI with a focus on collaboration and being understandable for young kids. To make everything fit together we had to create a new PDF reader for this UI. Of course we didn't want to write it from scratch, so we decided to base it on Evince.

Our application uses an evince View (ev_view) object embedded in a python application. This turns out to be fairly easy to do, with only a few modifications to the source tree to support building a library suited for embedding, and generating python bindings. I cloned the evince svn tree into a git tree available at http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/rwh/evince;a=summary. Normal compilation should still be possible, so maybe it would be nice to merge this embedding support back into the main tree in the (near) future: it might be useful for others, and of couse for us it would be much easier to follow the main tree.

Our hardware is very resource limited: the laptop has 256MB of RAM and no swap, since there is only 1GB of flash memory and you don't want to swap to that. The embedded evince eats quite some memory, especially for files with (large) images. I found bug http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=504913, which discusses the fact that extra gtk.Images are created for right-click -> copy actions. We don't support this feature, and disabling it resulted in about 3 times less memory usage for the pdf I linked to in that bug. I think for an embedded evince this should probably be default behavior, at least until a fix is available that creates those images only when they are required. But maybe a configure option would be nice for that for the time being; I'll probably implement it like that in our git tree.

Anyway, this is not the main reason for my post. As I said, memory is scarce in our system. We are being bitten a bit by the fact that evince renders the whole page, and not just the visible part. The screen on the XO is pretty small and high-res, so people will sometimes want to zoom-in quite a bit, resulting in high memory consumption. I've seen in the roadmap at http://live.gnome.org/Evince/Roadmap that this is a future feature for which resources are not really available. Bug http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=303365 discusses the issue as well. This is probably not that easy to do, and I wonder what you guys think about the solution.

For us it's pretty high priority, and I have a bit of time to work on it. Suggestions on how to start implementing and perhaps some help actually doing it would be greatly appreciated; I don't know the code-base that well. I want to make sure that if I work on this, I do it in a way that there is a good chance of it going upstream as well since I think it would be a good improvement to evince.

Beside this issue, evince works perfectly for us! :-)

Cheers,
Reinier


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