Sunday, February 25, 2007

Good riddance xpdfrc

Today has been a good day for poppler, there was a VERY interesting change related to a nice feature, but i'll leave Pino blog about it, so check out his blog!

My change was a minor one but well worth, i finally made poppler not to depend on a installed xpdfrc file, that dependance was there because our roots on xpdf, but it was silly to have it, as why should okular pdf rendering be affected by a file called xpdfrc?

Also Rajeev J Sebastian (insanekane) started pypoppler-qt4 hosted at the svn of our Pardus friends.

Finally let me thank Google for his SoC program as the interesting thing Pino will be blogging about was partially done under their program by Julien Rebetez.

Saturday, February 24, 2007

You've got to love Free Software developers

So one fellow poppler developer tells me he his having problems with a new code he is developing and a PDF created by scribus and asks for help to see if it's a problem on scribus or on poppler code. I have a look at the spec and the pdf and reach the conclusion that it's their fault, so i go into the #scribus IRC channel speak there with their nice developers, i convince them that it's a bug, and 10 hours later the bug is fixed. This rocks :-)

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Dead monitor

My Benq FP937s+ just died today while my mother was using the computer. The screen has gone black and won't come back, not even the OSD :-( The monitor is less than two years old, so hopefully it's still in guarantee, wish me luck...

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

pdftk frontend for KDE

Well, a week yes and the next one too, there is some request to add pdf modification options either to kpdf or to okular. This requests are always dismissed with "kpdf/okular is 'just' a viewer, not a swiss-tool".

That said i started to look for pdftk frontends i could suggest to the people and i could not find any good one so i thought i can try to create 'PDF Transformer' (work in progress name) as a "good" frontend for pdftk. The problem is defining "good", so fellow readers i'm asking for some help here, i'd describe what i have in mind and hope to get some comments if it seems good or not. Also if you know of a "good" frontend for pdftk just tellme and i'll be happy to scrap one thing from my todo list.

pdftk can do lots of things that are easy to do in dialogs and a relatively user friendly way, it's just merging of documents, modifying page ordering and removing of pages that i'm not sure how to implement in a way that can be more easy than just typing the whole command at the cli. My current idea is in this this mockup. You open the document[s] you want to use as input and get the list on pages on the left and a preview of the current selected page, you can rotate the currently selected pages, move them up or down or remove them. After you are finished you "create" the output file.

Ideas? Suggestions?