About ViewPDF, PDFKit and Curries

[Stefan Kleine Stegemann]

Hi,

sorry for beeing quiet so long. I've been quite busy with real-life and 
was not very motivated during the last months to work on ViewPDF/ 
PDFKit. However, after thinking about dropping the project I finally 
convinced myself to keep going. I'd like to give you a short overview 
about what's going on. Sorry for crossposting but I think it may be 
interesting for all GNUsteppers.

1.) PDFKit
I added some more stuff to PDFKit. The main feature is asynchroneous 
rendering which makes it possible to render a PDF page in the 
background thread and get notified when rendering is completed. This 
feature was crucial for the new multipage view (see below). 
Furthermore, I spend some time on reworking the API, adding caching and 
some other things. Although not much has changed in the interface, it's 
likely that future versions of PDFKit will be incompatible with the 
current version (@Enrico: i try to submit a patch for GWorkspace before 
I check in the changes).

PDFKit now runs also on OSX. I think I will provide a binary 
distribution at some point because compiling it is a little bit tricky 
since it requires freetype and the xpdf part to be compiled in "by 
hand".

2.) ViewPDF
ViewPDF has gone! I finally ended up rewriting it from scratch, 
avoiding all those mistakes I made in ViewPDF (perhaps adding new ones 
:-)). The main problem with ViewPDF was/is that it's not easy to 
integrate the new multipage view and that it has some serious design 
flaws. I decided that it might be a good idea to give the beast a new, 
fancy name. I ended up with "Vindaloo", named after one of my favourite 
curries. So from now on, the PDF reader is named Vindaloo (hopefully, 
it will end up beeing as spicy as it's eatable pendant :-)). Another 
goal for Vindaloo is that it must be running on OSX (since I don't like 
Apples Preview that much for reading PDFs). Vindaloo will have some 
new, cool features like a multipage view and a fullscreen view, a 
reworked search, maybe a multi-document search, ...

3.) Status
I haven't checked in anything into the gsimageapps cvs by now. I 
currently working quite hard to get something usable running. Here are 
two "teasers", giving a pretty good impression of the application's 
current state:
http://rzserv2.fhnon.de/~lg017420/files/vindaloo1.jpg
http://rzserv2.fhnon.de/~lg017420/files/vindaloo2.jpg
As soon as Vindaloo has reached a usable state (which does not mean 
that it is fully functional), I will try to release snapshots 
frequently. As I'm working on OSX at home and using Linux/GNUstep at 
work only, I would appreciate if some "pre-alpha testers" could grab 
the snapshots and test them on their systems. It would be great if 
these people are not afraid of making small changes to the code.

I can't promise any dates here, but I will really try to release a 
first snapshot within the next 4 weeks.

Thanks very much for reading this quite comprehensive mail, comments 
are appreciated.

Greets,
Stefan

--
Stefan Kleine Stegemann
Mail: stefankst at stud-lg.fhnon.de
Home: http://rzserv2.fhnon.de/~lg017420
PGP: http://rzserv2.fhnon.de/~lg017420/stefankst-pgp-key.asc