Looking for PDF with Japan2 fonts

The other day we realized poppler did not correctly supported Adobe-Japan2 fonts, so i went on and did some work that should make it work, but then i have no file to test, so if you could do

cd /
find -name "*pdf" -exec grep -H Japan2 {} \;

or

locate -0 .pdf | xargs -0 -n 1 grep -H Japan2

and send me (aacid@kde.org) a link to the pdf or the file pdf itself of all the files that match i could try to see if i did really fix it or not :-)

PC, MAC, GUADALINEX and LINEX compatible

You can read on fellow Catalan KDE translator blog that his son got an English learning CD that states to be compatible with two of the spanish regional goverment distributions, interesting to see that on an "Oxford University Press" material.

It does not state "GNU/Linux" compatibility, but it seems a sign that we are getting there.

Photo of the CD

Poppler 0.9.1 (0.10 Beta 2) released

Available from
http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.9.1.tar.gz

WARNING: This is a unstable release, it is actually 0.10 Beta 2 release, it should work like any release from the 0.8 branch, but do not blame us if it makes your chair break.

Differences with 0.9.0:
Core:
* Fix crash on some AESv2 encrypted files (bugs #13972, #16092, #17523)
* Improve parsing of broken files (bug #17568)

glib frontend:
* Minor improvements to the demo application

utils:
* pdftohtml: Generate the outline file in the same place of the other generated files (bug #17504)

Testing, patches and bug reports welcome.

Poppler 0.9.0 (0.10 Beta 1) released

Available from
http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.9.0.tar.gz

WARNING: This is a unstable release, it is actually 0.10 Beta 1 release, it should work like any release from the 0.8 branch, but do not blame us if it makes LHC destroy the world.

Differences with 0.8 branch:
 Core:
  * Initial JavaScript support
  * Annotation improvements
  * Improvements in the Arthur based renderer
  * Improvements in the Cairo based renderer
  * Added a JPEG2000 decoder based on OpenJPEG
  * Small fixes in ActualText implementation
  * Fix jpeg rendering when not using the libjpeg based decoder
  * Movie fixes
  * Do not get out of memory on documents that specify huge fonts
  * Emulate Adobe Reader on documents with duplicate keys in Dictionaries
  * Forms improvements  

 Qt4 frontend:
  * Annotation improvements
  * Forms improvements
  * Add the possibility of extracting embedded fonts
  * Initial Movie support
  * Documentation improvements
  * Small improvements in the PS exporter

 glib frontend:
  * Annotation improvements
  * Attachment fixes

 utils:
  * updated man pages
  * Added -listenc to pdfinfo and pdftotext

Testing, patches and bug reports welcome.

Looking for aKademy-es organizers

Somehow i managed to forget to announce here we are looking for organizers for this year KDE Spain users and developers meeting. If you are interested have a look at http://www.kde-espana.es/akademy-es2008/ubicacion.php. We are accepting proposals up to september 15th.

Poppler 0.8.7

Just two fixes, but you really want it as fixes a regression in Form handling introduced in Poppler 0.8.6.

Got it while it's hot http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.8.7.tar.gz

Looking for people

Dear Lazyweb,
At the poppler project we are trying to relicense all our patches as GPLv2 or later so that in case that xpdf is ever relicensed to something newer than gpl2 only we are not stuck because of patches.
The problem is that we have problems getting answers from everyone, so i'm posting this so that in case you know some of the missing people in person or have IM adreses of them, you can bug them for me.
And now onto the names:
- Marco Pesenti Gritti
- Kjartan Maaras
- Timothy Lee
- Carl Worth
- Ed Catmur - specially problematic has his mail server bounces mails

KHTML rocks

'nuff said. Keep it rocking guys!

Maemo scratchbox on amd64

So it seems the maemo scratchbox refuses to install on amd64, has anyone succeded in doinng so? Can i fool the script, or do i need to run a virtual machine with linux i386 inside and then run the scratchbox inside that?

KDE 4.1 adoption seems high

KDE 4.1.0 was released this very same week and already 17% of Konqueror users of the last month to my blog are using Konqueror 4.1, seems quite high to me

Catalan Summer of Code

So Catalan government decided to run a project similar to Google's Summer of code program. That's cool, the bad news is that the law that grants the money was approved as of May 30th and i just discovered the site because i was doing some random browsing.

So if you can read catalan go to http://www.lafarga.cat/beques/bases-de-la-convocatoria and start thinking what to do for Free Software.

Actually it seems like it's non-published on purpose so either:
a) It fails and politics can say "See Catalonia has no interest for Free Software" and they can go on paying Microsoft for doing sucky and patchy translations of their products to Catalan (yes they pay twice, license and translation)
b) Someone's son needs to make sure he is the chosen one, so the less publicity the better.

Bug your distro to package OpenJPEG

The new poppler major version that will come out in a month or so, sports a new JPEG2000 decoder based in OpenJPEG that is better than the current one, for example, it renders Google scanned docs, that is good. Yay! The problem is that actually not much distros package OpenJPEG (i could only find Debian), so go to your distro bug tracker and bug them to include OpenJPEG.

And BTW:

Poppler 0.8.5 released

Available from
http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.8.5.tar.gz

Changes since 0.8.4:
Core:
* Fix crash on PDF that define a page thumbnail but it's not a Stream
* Fix crash when Annots object is not of the desired type
* Fix crash when obtaining fonts in PDF where XObjects link themselves in loops
* Fix crash on documents with an IRT object
* Saving should work much better now
* Plug some memory leaks in Annotation handling

Utils:
* pdftohtml: Don't crash on documents that specify an invalid named dest for a link
* pdftohtml: Make html output to keep all the spaces with
* pdftohtml: Improve a bit text layout
* pdftohtml: Make xml output valid xml

Testing, patches and bug reports welcome.

As a side note, one of the four crashes was a CVE while the other three where not, of course the four are as critic as the other.

kpovmodeler looking for help

Andreas Zehender wrote

I'm looking for a skilled KDE developer with some knowledge in povray and 3D stuff, who will follow future KDE technology changes and keep kpovmodeler compilable and stable.!

So if you are interested mail him!

Away from the internet

I'll be without internet connection until the 19th/20th of July so if you mail me, no i'm not ignoring you, i'm just cycling around sardinia :-)

If you need a quick answer for anything i might now, just write the appropiate mailing list for that question, i'm not that special i'm the only one that can asnwer your questions.

On football, national feelings et al

Be warned, this is not a KDE nor Free Software post, if you don't want to read it, don't do it.

Be warned 2, this post is going to be controversial, please don't write saying "You idiot" or similar/worst things, i'm trying to be as respectful as i can when dumping my brain into this post.

So it seems Spain just won Eurocup 2008, lots of people in the streets making noise and using firecrackers/fireworks leftovers from Sant Joan that was just a few days ago.

The ones that know me well know that i don't have a big Spanish feeling, i feel more Catalan and European, but to tell the truth i have mixed feelings about this Spain win.

On the good side, the spanish team is formed by young talented players, that don't act like if they were gods and that do a rather good football. And most of that players feel sympatic and someone you might empathize with, so they winning feels good.

On the other side, looking at the flags spanish followers waved at the stadium you can find three types at very similar rates of use:
* Normal Spanish flag: Nothing to say
* Spanish flag with a bull: Mixed feelings again, the bull is a animal that i probably would say i like if you ask me, but that bull flag is most of the times used either to support bullfighting or to support a rancid view about Spain. And i disagree with both
* Franquist flag: Yes, you might wonder why around one third of people supporting Spain soccer team wave a flag that means you don't like democracy nor any kind of personal rights. I do wonder too.

And then you have people like someone in my neighborhood that play cara al sol, a semi-official franquist song, each time Spain wins.

And that makes me wish Germany did win.

Sadly, i have to agree with what a coworker says: "España es un pais de pandereta" (not sure if makes sense translated but that'd be "Spain is a country of tambourine")

Installed OpenSuse 11.0

Just installed OpenSuse 11.0 in the laptop. They've done an good job in overall putting KDE 4 in a distro but i had two important problems, so i'm going to blog about them so that if someone has the same problem can find it.

First, the installer misdetected my monitor resolution, then i told him the good one, but that ended up in a messed xorg.conf that applied zoom onto the desktop, i had the remove the Option "PreferredMode" line from the file.

Second, knetworkmanager won't connect to my wifi network, i had to update (using a wired connection) and then it worked like a charm.

KDE, plugins, GPL and closed source applications

Here i was today, thinking about this stuff (yeah you can say i'm weird).

In KDE all of our core libs are LGPL so if someone owns a Qt commercial license he can write closed source applications using kdelibs.

In KDE we also have this nice technology called KParts that let's you load plugins for lots of things on runtime. One of the KParts possibilities is to load a KPart for a specific mimetype.

Let's say the above closed source application uses KParts to preview things, and the user of that closed source application decides to preview a PDF.

In that moment, the KPart system will lookup and load the OkularPart that is able of viewing PDFs.

And there is where my mind broke, OkularPart is GPL and is being used by a closed source application.

"NO! VIOLATION!" Does my mind shout, but how can the closed source developer prevent it? All he did is use a LGPL library, so, maybe this is not a violation? And if it is, what are we doing in the KDE project to help the closed source developer be a good citizen? Maybe we should tell the kpart system what kind of Parts are acceptable?

Can someone highlight me?

Dead monitor (again)

On wednesday, my Benq FP937s+ died again, it does not want to power on, the same thing that happened 15 months ago. Not good to have the most expensive Benq monitor at the time it was bought to die twice in less than 3 years :-(

Luckily i've still 3 months of guarantee so i'll be getting a new^Wrepaired one for free.

Looking for PDF with JPX streams

I'm currently working on a patch for poppler that makes use of OpenJPEG to decode JPX streams instead of the xpdf inherited code because the inherited code does not work for some PDF and i think that there's no reason not to use an already existing solution if it works. And that's the question, i need more PDF with JPX streams to be sure my 170 lines of code + OpenJPEG can replace the 3200 of xpdf code without any regression.

So if you could

cd /
find -name "*pdf" -exec grep -H JPXDecode {} \;

or as said in the comments

locate -0 .pdf | xargs -0 -n 1 grep -H JPXDecode

and send me (aacid@kde.org) a link to the pdf or the file pdf itself of all the files that match.