Saturday, August 06, 2011

Try the new Okular selection branch

Mahfuzur Rahman Mamun has been working on a GSOC to bring multi column support to Okular text selection, it has reached the state where it would be nice to have other people testing it and giving some feedback about what you think about it. So please all you heavy okular users go, checkout the selection_and_highlighting branch and either write here or write to the okular-devel mailing list.

12 comments:

  1. So what is the easy way to build Okular?

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  2. I guess using any of the "automated" build tools around KDE but i do not use them so can't comment on it

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  3. Checked it out with a couple of two column pdfs, selection and highlighting work well. :)
    However, doesn't work with any three column pdfs I've tried. :(
    Great to see this feature being added. I know it will get better in time.
    Great work Mamun.
    Okular FTW!!

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  4. Can you please post a link to the three column pdf you tried?

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  5. Here are some of the files I've tried
    br_lineMar07.pdf
    u_turn_18-19.pdf
    investors-digest-article.pdf

    I got them from a search for three column pdfs

    Hope that helps.

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  6. It is not actually related with the number of columns. I have tested on four even five columned pdfs. It is related with the complexity of the layout. I have not implemented the cases of complex layouts which is the reason it is failing now. But, the formats of complex layouts comes in magazines and newspapers and do not occur in scientific papers (conference papers) naturally.

    Please see the blog post http://nightcrawlerinshadow.wordpress.com/

    You can get a better idea about the implementation there.

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  7. I can't find the selection_and_highlighting branch. Is git://anongit.kde.org/okular the correct URL?
    I thought that maybe it was merged in master but after compiling it, it seems that multicolumn highlighting is still broken. What am I doing wrong?

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  8. @Azou: Yes, it's been merged to master. Open a bug if you have a multicolumn document where selection does not properly get cut at the column level.

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  9. Thanks for your reply
    Ok but before I do, I have to be sure it is a bug.
    Here what I did in order:
    git clone git://anongit.kde.org/okular
    compiled with
    cmake ~/Programs/Installeurs/kde-devel/src/okular/ \
    -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=debugfull\
    -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$KDEDIR
    (with KDEDIR being ~/Programs/kde-devel)
    make
    make install

    I launch it using ~/Programs/kde-devel/bin/okular.

    Is this correct?

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  10. No, it's not, you are missing a bit, read the "If you install Okular in a different path than your system kde4 install directory it is possible that you need to run" part in http://okular.kde.org/download.php

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  11. This is GREAT! it works perfectly! I'll add that to my bashrc. Thank you so much, you maybe don't know that, but you saved my life!

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