Poppler 0.18.0 released

Poppler 0.18.0 is here! It took 9 months and was delayed around 3 months because of my infamous laptop dead but I was finally able to release 0.18.0 today.

The changes are too big to explain in detail (12000 lines changed in 236 files) but I'll give a few highlights:
* General speed improvements
* Quaility and speed improvements in the Splash renderer (used by Okular)
* Quaility improvements in the Cairo renderer (used by Evince)
* Better Annotation support
* Better Form support
* Introduction of pdftocairo, a command line utility that uses the Cairo renderer to render pdf pages to png, etc.
* Introduction of pdfseparate, a command line utility that extracts pages of PDF files
* Introduction of pdfunite, a command line utility that can merges multiple PDF files into a single one
* Removal of pdftoabw as it was unmaintained
* Removal of the Qt3 frontend as it was unmaintained

You can have a look at the full changelog going to the Poppler releases page and having a look at the changes of 0.18.0, 0.17.4, 0.17.3, 0.17.2, 0.17.1 and 0.17.0

KDE git 4.7 branches renamed to KDE/4.7

Since 5 days ago, the git repositories that used 4.7 as branch name (kdepimlibs, kdepim, kdepim-runtime, kdeplasma-addons, okular, mobipocket and the repos of what used to be kdeedu and kdeutils) now use KDE/4.7 to be consistent with the rest of git repositories that are released together in the KDE SC.

Be sure you work on the correct branch and do not push the wrong branch names again. Also it might make sense to run "git remote prune origin" on your clones so that the now unexisting branches are removed from your local copy.

Note: I did not do this work, but I haven't seen anything on the planet so I thought it made sense blogging about it

KDE l10n essential requirements changed

In the past we asked KDE translation teams to translate kdebase at least a 75% if they wanted to be part of a KDE release. With the evolution of KDE towards something less monolithic it made less and less sense to have that requirement, so today, going along with the split of the old kdebase directory of translations to kde-runtime, kde-workspace and kde-baseapps we have changed the requirement to be a 90% of kde-runtime.

It is a increase in percentage, but it is really a decrease of total messages required since previously 75% of kdebase was around 13000 messages and 90% of kde-runtime is around 3000.

You can check the essential requirements for what will be KDE 4.8 at http://l10n.kde.org/stats/gui/trunk-kde4/essential/

KDE SC 4.8 Release Schedule

KDE SC 4.8 Release Schedule was made official last Saturday. If everything goes to plan (and we have been able to keep with schedules quite good lately) we should be enjoying new 4.8 goodness by late January 2012. Remeber you can keep up to date with releases using the http://www.kde.org/releaseschedule.ics calendar file.

How a patch for poppler made me fix a bug in Konsole

In March, Tim Brody sent a patch to the poppler mailing list to make poppler extract accentuated characters of old pdf generated by latex (where the character and the accent where represented as two different glyphs) as a character plus a combining character. After testing the patch i saw it did not work at all, as it was changing the output of pdftotext from
R. L¨wen and B. Polster
o
to
R. Lowen and B. Polster
instead of
R. Löwen and B. Polster

Tim answered with a "WorksForMe" that left us quite puzzled for a while. It took me some time to realize it was actually Konsole's fault as it did not understand combining characters. A bug about that had already been reported by Thiago back in 2005. As i had been bit by that bug I decided to have a go at fixing it and after some days of coding I landed a patch to support Unicode composing characters in Konsole. Unfortunately it was already too late for KDE 4.7 so you'll have to wait until 4.8 to enjoy of this goodness (or use master ;))

P.S: Tim if you are reading this you never answered about the regressions caused by your patch so it was never committed to poppler