[evince] GSoC 2013 application proposal

[Gökçen Eraslan <gokcen eraslan gmail com>]

Hello,

I would like to apply to GNOME/Evince project for GSoC 2013. However, 
I'm a bit confused about the available Evince GSoC ideas and what to 
focus on my proposal. First let me introduce myself.

I have been contributing to free software for a long time. I was a 
Pardus Linux[1] developer which was once popular KDE-oriented from 
scratch distribution now suffering from the lack of developers due to 
wrong strategies. Anyway, I have contributed to KDE and LibreOffice 
projects[2]. I have experience on Qt/PyQt/PyKDE GUI programming. In GSoC 
2012, I have successfully completed PDF signing implementation in 
LibreOffice project. Therefore, I'm experienced on PDF specification.

Now, about GSoC 2013, I would like to apply to Evince project however, I 
am a bit confused about the ideasand my proposal. Is it OK to write a 
proposal to implement "Several improvements to Evince"[3] or "Improve 
the support for PDF Documents in GNOME"[3]? Or should I pick a specific 
one for example PDF forms improvements and focus on this one instead? 
Actually since I have little experience on GTK programming I would like 
to implement something more relevant to the PDF spec itself. In this 
sense, PDF form enhancements (or maybe annotation improvements) is a 
fine task for me.

By the way, isn't the "Highlighting support" idea similar to annotation 
improvement idea? I mean, isn't a highlight an annotation with a 
"Highlight" Subtype in annotation dictionary?

In addition to the ideas in [3] and [4], I also have some rough ideas 
for GSoC (forgive me if any of these was mentioned before on a bug entry 
or in the mailing list etc.):

- Reading view support: Android PDF reader and Android Adobe Reader 
applications have this feature. It basically renders PDF documents as if 
they are reflowable documents[5]. Here[6] is the default (page) view and 
here[7] is a demonstration of the same page through the reading view 
(a.k.a reflow mode). This seems actually more beneficial for 
small-screen sized devices.

- Dictionary support: As its name suggest, clicking on a word and 
instantly translating it would be an awesome feature. We can use 
gnome-dictionary/libgdict.

I know there are long-standing feature requests and they deserve higher 
priorities however I just wanted to share my thoughts. Thanks for 
reading that long mail.

Regards.


[1] http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=06895
[2] https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/gokcene
[3] https://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2013/Ideas
[4] https://live.gnome.org/EvinceSocIdeas
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflowable_document
[6] http://s24.postimg.org/hwl13ltr9/PDF_Reading_View_Page_View.png
[7] http://s23.postimg.org/jy0dqn4kb/PDF_Reading_View_Reading_View.png


--
Gökcen Eraslan