Re: [evince] GSoC 2013 application proposal

[Gökçen Eraslan <gokcen eraslan gmail com>]

On 30-04-2013 20:21, Germán Póo-Caamaño wrote:
> On Tue, 2013-04-30 at 16:11 +0200, Gökçen Eraslan wrote:
> > [...]
> > 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?
>
> Hi Gökcen,

Hello again,

> First at all, I am not an Evince developer although I am familiar with
> the project.
>
> AFAIK, it is fine to propose something different as long as it is clear,
> it is feasible to do, it is measurable and it is in the interests of
> Evince.
>
> You have to consider that is a equivalente of 3-month internship - ~40
> hours a week.
>
> You should also consider that you can submit a proposal (or more than
> one proposal) and refine it as the discussion goes.

OK.

> > 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.
>
> For the annotations (or anything to do in the backend), you only need
> glib.  See below:
>
> > 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?
>
> It is.  If you implement highlight, you automatically implement strike
> out, underline, and squiggly as well.  The missing part is the support
> in libpoppler-glib, because poppler already support them.
>
> The task should be to provide an API for glib to work with annotations,
> integrate it with the render (to show it visually) and, then, integrate
> it with evince.

Oh, I didn't know that poppler-glib layer has also missing things 
regarding annotations.

> You can take a look at:
> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51487

OK. I can see your patches to add some annotation object types to 
poppler-glib code, nice :)

> In Bugzilla there is a special category for annotations.  You will find
> 27 related bugs.  You might want to check:
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=583377
>
> > 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.
>
> This is:
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=556018
>
> This is nice, although I would with less priority than annotations. If
> you decide to apply for this one, you might want to add support for crop
> marks:
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=696353
>
> > - 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.
>
> Although this would be nice, gnome-dictionary has limitations.

OK, then. As jaliste also suggested (on IRC), I think I'm going to go 
for highlight support and maybe for other annotation types in general, 
if I have further time.

--
Gökcen Eraslan