Okular PDF digital signature improvements coming "soon" thanks to NLnet

Starting on January I will be working on a project named "Improve Okular digital signature support" that has received a grant from the NLnet foundation as part of the NGI Assure fund.

This will allow me to work part time on Okular (in case it's not clear I work on Okular on a "when I have time-hobby" basis right now), the planned improvements are:

1. Support for signing unsigned signatures. I know it sounds confusing, think about it like something like the old "sign here" boxes on printed paper forms.

2. Support digital signatures in the Okular Windows version

3. Make signature text support all character sets

4. Write Okular-mobile user interface to show signature status

5. Support digital signatures in the Okular Android version

But I'm hoping to squeeze some other signature related improvements in, if you have a particular favourite please leave a comment.

Thanks to NLnet for trusting me on this, and also thanks to my current employer (KDAB) for allowing me to work less hours for a few months so I can take on this project.

KDE Gear 21.12 releases branches created

Please make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the 21.12
releases to them.

We're already past the dependency freeze, so no new dependencies or
increasing of dependency versions in the stable branches.

The feature freeze, tagging and release of the beta (21.11.80) is in four
days,11 November.

Next interesting dates:
  November 25: 21.12 RC (21.11.90) Tagging and Release
  December  2: 21.12 Tagging
  December  9: 21.12 Release

Complete Schedule:
https://community.kde.org/Schedules/KDE_Gear_21.12_Schedule

KDE Gear 21.12 releases schedule finalized

 It is available at the usual place https://community.kde.org/Schedules/KDE_Gear_21.12_Schedule

 
Dependency freeze is in four weeks (November 4) and Feature Freeze a week after that, make sure you start finishing your stuff!

PSA: Don't insult or physically threaten people to try to convince them you are right

Sadly I have had to disable comments in my previous blog because there is a being [that probably passes by human if you look at them] that started with insults, continued with more insults and then graduated to physically threaten me.

 

I always thought it was obvious, but if you insult people or try to cause them phisical harm, they are usually less prone to think "oh you're right, you've convinced me" and more prone to think "this human needs to stop harassing me and sort out their problems".

American English speakers: Kiev or Kyiv ?

A while ago there was a merge request created for KGeography asking to change Kiev to Kyiv saying "this is the official transliteration of the name for the city".

But that's not what the default text in KGeography shows, the default text in KGeography not the official names of places, the default text in KGeography is the American English translation of KGeography, that's why it says Poland and not Polska.

So question for you American English speakers, if you wanted to write the name of the capital of Ukraine, would you write Kiev or Kyiv?

Edit: comments blocked because there's an body without brain that can't behave in the internet.

Poppler 21.09 will have a massive speed increase for PDF files that use lots of save/restore PDF commands

Take the file from poppler issue 1126. It's a file that doesn't look super complicated, a map of some caves.

With Poppler 21.08 it took 46 seconds to render in my relatively powerful i9-8950HK

 

Thanks to a patch from Thomas Freitag that time got reduced to 28 seconds by not recalculating again something we had already calculated and just copying it. Huge improvement! [This patch was developed prior to the filing of issue 1126, i guess Thomas had found similar issues on his own]

Then issue 1126 was created yesterday and it was clear that we were still super slow, mupdf/gs/firefox/chromium can render the file almost instantly, and we were at 28 seconds :/

So i had a look at the code and thought, why are we even copying the data if that data never changes? So I made a patch that brought rendering time down to 2.8 seconds :)

 

And then i had another look at the code and realized we were copying some more data that was never even used

 

 

After patching that we're standing at 1.5 seconds

The 3 combined patches have reduced the rendering time by more than 95%

P.S: This only applies to the Splash backend (used by Okular), the Cairo backend (used by Evince) is at 120 seconds, so someone should have a look because probably similar improvements can be made.

KDE Gear 21.08 releases branches created

Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the 21.08 releases to them

We're already past the dependency freeze.

The Feature Freeze and Beta is this Thursday 15 of July.

More interesting dates:

• July 29: 21.08 RC (21.07.90) Tagging and Release

• August  5: 21.08 Tagging

• August 12: 21.08 Release

https://community.kde.org/Schedules/release_service/21.08_Release_Schedule