Okular behaviour on Left/Right Arrow Key

Another question about what you, the okular users, think of a new feature proposed and implemented by Thomas Etter.

Please comment in the forum and not here since it makes it much easier to keep track of all the opinions!

Akademy-es 2012 it's here!

It is the time of the year of Akademy-es, the yearly KDE users and developers spanish meeting, if you were wondering were are the news, stop wondering! It's here ;-)



The Akademy-es 2012 will take place in the nice city of Zaragoza from 18th to 20th of May

Registration is open and the schedule is almost final and of course a big thanks to our hosts and sponsors.

See you in Zaragoza!

Reminder: KDE 4.9 is at the corner!

May 3: KDE 4.9 Soft Feature Freeze
May 17: KDE 4.9 Hard Feature Freeze
May 24: KDE 4.9 Beta 1 Tagging

Which means 1 month to Hard Feature Freeze.

Okular word selection on double click

I've just commited a change that implements a wish created 3 years ago "Double click to select words".

Another little nice feature for Okular :-)

It felt good doing some actual coding instead of being the code review monkey I am these days in the KDE/poppler worlds.

/me goes back to the boringness of reviewing other people's code :-/

Okular: Multiple bookmarks per page

Following the series of "We don't kwow what to do so we are going to ask you", we present you "Improvement on Okular bookmarks: How to handle more than one bookmark per page".

Please head over http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=100729 and give mailson your opinion!

KDE SC 4.9 Release Schedule

KDE SC 4.9 Release Schedule has just been made official. If everything goes to plan (and we have been able to keep with schedules quite good lately) we should be enjoying new 4.9 goodness by early August 2012. Remember you can keep up to date with releases using the http://www.kde.org/releaseschedule.ics calendar file.

Okular users we want your input!

Sometimes the decision of how a program should behave is not right or wrong technically but based on the user expectation.

In Okular we are asking ourselves what should happen when you have two lines with the following text

This is an ex-
ample

and copy it. Should it return "This is an ex-\nample" or "This is an ex-ample" or "This is an example"?

Head over to the KDE forums and vote!

Okular now with hyphen aware search

Thanks to Mahfuzur Rahman Mamun (of column text selection GSoC fame) we can now search for words that have hyphens to split them between lines.

This is a new feature so it'll be only available with KDE 4.9.0

Okular 0.14 released!

KDE 4.8 just got released and that means Okular 0.14 also got released!

First of all I'd like to thank everyone that has done a git commit in the KDE 4.7 → KDE 4.8 trip, here the list in alphabetical order: Aaron Seigo, Aleix Pol, Christopher Reichert, Dario Freddi, David Faure, David Palacio, Elvis Stansvik, Frederik Schwarzer, Geoffry Song, Jiri Baum, Kevin Kofler, Martin Ueding, Michal Svec, Michel Ludwig, Mohammad Mahfuzur Rahman Mamun, Montel Laurent, Niels Ole Salscheider, Patrick von Reth, Philip Muskovac, Pino Toscano, Ralf Habacker, Stephen Anthony, Yuri Chornoivan.

That's more than 20 people! Awesome :-)

This release introduces new features like improved text selection in documents with columns, table selection tool, LaTex rendering in annotations, improved embedded support (for use in e.g. Kile), better layouting for facing pages, smarter screensaver/powermanagement handling, improved page label support, default zoom configuration, improved Landscape printing, etc.

You can find a non complete list of bugs and features in bugzilla.

And best of all there's already new features in the pipeline for the next release :-)

Let's keep the ball rolling!

Come Dine with Me and KDE 4.8

KDE is releasing 4.8 the 25th of January (if all goes well) and to celebrate that KDE España is organizing two dinners, one in Madrid the 20th of January and another one in Barcelona the 27th of January. Coincidentally i happen to be on both cities on the dates the dinners happen so if you are around come and chat with other KDE people! More info at http://www.kde-espana.es/news.php#itemCenasKDE48

My top 10 blog posts of 2011

Top 10 blog entries with more visits in 2011 in my blog:
10 - Poppler 0.18.0 released
    Poppler's latest major release gets the last spot on the list, PDF greatness for all!

9 - Okular and Send by Mail
    Interesting discussion of where does a feature belong. Outcome: kparts will get plasma share-like-connect awareness and you'll be able to share (including sending by mail) stuff from there :-)

8 - Poppler for windows
    Poppler for windows, a classic in my top lists since I wrote that blog originally in 2006!

7 - My CPU fan does not speedup
    When the CPU melted i discovered why, there was too much dust in the fan... :-/

6 - Blinken: First KDE App on the Nokia Store?
    KDE starts conquering the N9 application space, KAlgebra followed soon

5 - XPS viewer for Linux
    Microsoft seems to be succeeding in forcing XPS down people's throat, i did not expect linux users to have a need for XPS viewing

4 - keyboard crazyness
    Somehow Google loves this blogpost and sends people searching for keyboard to it

3 - KDE SC 4.8 Release Schedule
    People wants to know when new awesomeness will be out. Answer: soon!

2 - N9 disappointment
    Wonder if people reaching this page understand my disappointment, the N9 is an awesome phone, it just it doesn't meet my free software expectations

1 - Beware of KDE 4.6.4
    We had a small slip when packaging KDE 4.6.4, people wanted to know about it

Help KDE España while subscribing to Linux-Magazine.es

If you were thinking to subscribe to Linux-Magazine.es you might want to have a look at this offer, which lets you to pay the amount you want for 6 issues (well, actually it has to be >= 2€ but 2€ for 6 magazines borders stealing in my opinion :D) and you even get to choose to donate 10% to KDE España or other Free Software organizations.

KDE España is looking for Akademy-es 2012 locations

In KDE España we are looking for a group or organization in condition of co-organizer for Akademy-es 2012. If you are interested have a look at the call for locations page. If you are interested do not forget to send your submission in before February 25th.

Sad story of the day: Qt and XF86XK_TouchpadToggle

Today I realized Gnome has support for XF86XK_TouchpadToggle, i.e. if you press the key in your keyboard that has the touchpad with an X symbol over it, it toggles the enabled state of the touchpad.

This is very useful if you are like me and attach/detach a mouse various times during the day.

Since as far as I know this is not supported in KDE, this afternoon I decided to write a quick kded module that would listen to XF86XK_TouchpadToggle and call the corresponding XInput2 functions to toggle the state of the touchpad.

Investigating XInput2 was supposed to be the difficult part since it is out of my area of comfort, but at the end it resulted it was not that difficult and the desired effect can be achieved with no more than 10 lines of code.

After getting the correct XInput2 calls I started to build the skeleton of my kded module and when I was going to register the global KAction to listen for XF86XK_TouchpadToggle I realized Qt does not have support for this key, which means I can not use a KAction for that. Sad :-/

This has resulted in my getting diverted from my original goal and writing a patch for Qt5 to support the XF86XK_TouchpadToggle key and two other ones. Sadly this does not solve my immediate itch so I will either live with that itch or try to detect the keypress at the X level, but i'm not sure that's something I want to do :D

Update: I went the X11 way and it was not that painful. I now have some code that works, putting it in a git repo as soon as I get one :-)

Join KDE! Translate KDE!

It's that time of year again, KDE is nearing a new release day and it's time for translators to work on the making sure that new software/features are properly translated so that the thousands of KDE users can enjoy it in their native language.

Unfortunately translators come and go and KDE software continues to grow and grow, meaning that sometimes some languages fall below the line of what we consider an acceptable amount of translations for them to be shipped with the KDE releases.

For this 4.8 cycle this is the list of languages that was in 4.7 and if the release was today would not be released: Arabic, Bulgarian, Galician, Hebrew, Irish Gaelic, Indonesian, Japanese, Kannada, Latvian, Norwegian Nynorsk, Punjabi, Uyghur and Walloon

Obviously this does not mean that they will not released with KDE since each translation team has a different work schedule and some of them only work when really close to a release, but if you are a user enjoying KDE on one of the above languages you should think on volunteering to do some work so it stays that way. This is your opportunity to make a difference, write me to aacid@kde.org and join KDE by working on translations!

New job

Today has been my first day in my new job. I've started working as Software Engineer for

Since late August I had been doing interviews here in Barcelona but most of them were not really interesting only fullfilling the last of my four wanted points:
* Interesting job
* Linux related
* Free Software related
* Barcelona based

Working for Canonical gives me those four points and as an extra the salary is better than the average Barcelona job, so I can't complain :-)

As note i am almost sure my regular work will *not* be working in creating Kubuntu so don't ask me for feature improvements/bugfixes for it.

KDE/Harmattan brings me back to Berlin!

Until this summer I had never been in Berlin. And now after going there this August for the Desktop Summit, I am going back this weekend for the KDE/Harmattan sprint. My plan for this sprint involves trying to port KTuberling to Harmattan, should not be too difficult after my Blinken port, investigate how to use a proper kdelibs instead of libkok and try to learn as much of possible from all the attendants :-)

Okular and Send by Mail

There are regular requests about Okular having a "Send by Mail" menu item in the File menu.

In terms of implementation, it is a five minutes hack, since all you have to do is create a new KAction that calls KToolInvocation::invokeMailer with a few params and you are done.

Yet, i have been refusing to implement it since i do not think it is Okular responsibility to offer this feature.

I can understand that users are used to Adobe Reader having it, and in the unintegrated world of Windows it makes sense that every app includes as many features as possible since it is you versus the world.

On the other hand, in KDE land we pride ourselves of having things properly integrated and each feature in the software where it logically belongs, and in my book, the action of initiating the sending of an email, does not belong to a document viewer.

It is true though, that even if I've been involved in UI designing/programming for a while I can't still say I know what belongs to a given program or not.

Because once we add it to Okular? Why not to gwenview? And why not to Calligra? And And And?

What do you think?

Blinken: First KDE App on the Nokia Store?

Today Nokia approved Blinken for the N9/N950 and it appeared in the Nokia store.

I started coding Blinken (back then known by the ksimon name) in February 2005 and a few months later it joined the KDE Education project.

The last few months I've been playing with the N950 that the nice people at Nokia lent me and soon I realized that thanks to the Document Viewer (based in Calligra) it has some sort of kdelibs on the device (by the name of libkok) so porting KDE applications to it became a bit easier.

With the aim of having Blinken on my phone I started to work and after a few ifdefs for the mouse hover handling and a bit of QML for bits of the UI I ended up with this commit that makes Blinken available for another platform and to my knowledge makes it the first KDE application in the Nokia Store.

PelleTut, we love you too!

A nice user by the nickname of PelleTut just dropped by the #okular IRC channel and after me telling him "use evince instead of okular if you like it more/does what you want", he answered with a nice "lol, retard" and then quit.

Great way to convince us to implement those missing features!