Re: [evince] PDF metatags editing

[Jakub Kucharski <jakubkucharski97 gmail com>]

On Wed, 2016-01-20 at 00:38 -0300, jose aliste gmail com wrote:
> Hi,
>
> see answers inline
>
> On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 8:56 PM, Jakub Kucharski <jakubkucharski97@gm
> ail.com
> > wrote:
>
> > Hello everyone,
> >
> > I've started developing an application for editing PDF metatags and
> > I've just realised that this functionality could be integrated into
> > Evince itself.
> >
> > I'm curious what you'd think of such a contribution. When I finish
> > writing the code responsible for modifying PDF metatags, I could
> > work
> > (possibly with some help) on finding my way around Evince codebase
> > and
> > teaching Evince to do it.
> >
> > My understanding is that Evince uses Poppler which offers only the
> > retrieval of metadata, not its modification, so my code wouldn't
> > involve Poppler, nor any other pdf library --- note that I want
> > this
> > code to just modify metadata, not generate an entirely new PDF with
> > the
> > same text, images etc., but different metatags.
> >
> > To complement German's answer: Evince does not have ANY pdf
> > dependent
> code, except for the code in the backend (ev-poppler.cc), which is
> basically wrapper around poppler code.
>
>
>
> > I don't promise anything yet, since I lack experience with such
> > large
> > codebases; but I could certainly try. For now I just want to know
> > if
> > this functionality would be welcomed and if I could ask someone
> > from
> > time to time some dumb questions concerning Evince code and
> > development
> > process. In any other case, nothing's lost --- I'd just implement
> > it in
> > a separate application.
> Any contribution in principle is welcomed. That being said,
> contributions
> have to pass through maintainer's reviews and it's difficult to say,
> in
> advance, whether a certain contribution will be eventally merged or
> not.
> Best thing is to show some patches and then ask for advice.
> Unfortunately,
> due to limited manpower, we can't do anything better. But feel free
> to ask
> me questions via email ( I am not on IRC these days quite often)
>
>
> Greetings
>
> José

My changes to poppler (at least the core and glib patches) have finally
been accepted, so this functionality should be available in poppler-
glib since the 0.46 version. I've found a bug report[1] concerning the
same topic, so I could send my (future) patches there. Now the question
is: can I already rely on it? Or do I have to wait a bit? Or perhaps it
would just be accepted for GNOME 3.24, when poppler 0.46 would be
available in the major distros? (It's a guess. I'm on Arch, so I'm not
sure how long it can take for other distros.)

Another thing is the UI. I'm not sure whether I should implement with
edit mode (like editing data is implemented in GNOME Contacts) or just
display the metadata in GtkEntry widgets in the "Properties..." window
right from the start.

Jakub

[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=684851