Well. I'm in. Google accepted the proposal i sent, although not sure what to do now (check taxes in poland, read strange pdf's google sent), I'm really happy about it. I started the project on sourceforge already. So what's the idea? I'll take the proposal I sent to google and try to specify several development milestones. I would like to say a special Thank You to Albert Astals Cid, who agreed to mentor this project from the KDE side :) It is not the first project I'm doing for KDE, but it's the first one which consists of so much code :) I am really happy about working with you Albert :)
oKular - taking kpdf beyond just pdf's
The goal is to make a unified viewer that would use the kpdf shell and have all the superb features it provides, while supporting as many formats as possible (while the formats are rationally chosen, no use to have support for video files in kpdf).
What does KDE get? A viewer for many formats with:
- One unified look and feel
- Possibility for third party vendors to provide plugins for their format usign the public API
- Fast viewer for lots of formats that is easily embeddable in other apps like file browsers, mail readers or any other application that deals with files of different types. (thanks to recently released kpart plugin for Firefox, Firefox users finally get a decent plugin for several formats too)
- All the features of kpdf but for many more formats (including the annotation support)
- With the kword plugin ready, one will not have to wait for kword to start just to preview a document.
First milestones:
- have a fairly well designed API for the plugin structure, Stefan Kebekus asked me to check if I could use the (much incomplete) kviewshell API as a basis.
- port kpdf xpdf backend to the new plugin api
- write ghostview backend
- write chm backend
- write kword backend (and support converting formats we have kword filters internally)
I will start to code all the stuff somewhere on Wednesday, before I want to:
- publish an article about localisations in KDE, localisations not translations, about where do they suck and where are they done as properly as the non-english speaking KDE users deserve
- publish an article on one of the biggest opensource portals in Poland - 7thguard.net - about the KDE/Wikimedia cooperation and how can it be used to improve user experience
- reopen my polish blog :)
