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Viewer
This is a little overview about the Viewer that I'm going to write.
As you perhaps already know, I already started working on a new pdf-viewer based on mupdf. My first goal will be to make pdfviewer that will have at least "as good as all" features of BePDF. It will have a rendering engine, which will do pre-rendering and caching in a separate thread, so that the responsiveness of the gui is not affected. "Continuously" scrolling and panning will be possible. I will try to make a gui that will be easiyl to use, and it will perhaps have a feeling of being somehow new, but it will be also able to switch to a more traditional look.
I will have to work on that application for a lot of time. I willl work on it about a full month, then make a break, and continue working on it again.
It will be not only a pdfviewer, but also an xps viewer , and also djvu viewer.
On my plan is also the idea to write a pdf to image translator , so that other applications can easily make use of pdf files (for example imagine, the file browser having the ability to show the pre-view of a pdf-file). Write a plug-in for webpositive, for watching pdf-files directly in the browser could be a good ideea too.
I will bring about every week a new version out for testing, so that you can test it and give me suggestions how to improve it. All the work I will do on the viewer will depend also on the donatios (pdf viewer bountry) you will make. The bountry will have no "target", but I will check from time to time how much was donated and how much I worked on it, and if that proportion of (donations / work done) will be very very low, then I will have to stop. If I would be in a better situation I would do the coding fully for free (like I did with the chess-game puri), but at the moment I can not affort that. That means, the end-result of the viewer will depend also on you.
I want to try to make a very good viewer, that means, I will also need your help. Perhaps you have idea special idea how make it work/look. If you like a special features of a certain pdfviewer perhaps you can make a little sceenshot and publish it here. Perhaps we can collect more ideas.
I'm already very thankful to czeidler and others for their suggestions related to the pdfviewer that they gave me already.
Comments
http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fhaikuware.ru%2Fsoftware%2Fdjvuviewer
e.g.
1000 USD = Port
2000 USD = Feature
Maybe just me but it seems a bit vague.
Since the haiku-developers are interested to replace BePDF with that Viewer, I will continue improving it independent of the donations (But sadly i have at the very little time for programming, but i hope at x-mas i will make more improvements).
The 1.000 dollar target, is in really not a target, since I will make the improvements independent of the donations. The features that I want to see implemented in the Viewer should be the functionallity that you have on a modern pdf-viewer on windows (like for example FoxitReader, StduViewer, SumatraPDF). Since it's based on MuPDF I can implement just the functionality that MuPDF supports, and for the moment that means, that displaying annotations is possible, but creating annotations is not yet possible.
Once the "standard features" are implemented, I will continue adding more advanced editing features, that let you manipulate your pdf files. For example dragging one certain pdf-page of an document, into another pdf-document at a certain position.
In conclusion, at the moment there is no relations of "donated money - features" (the implemented features, at the moment depend more on the free time i find to spend programming).
Even more, after I think that the bountry is closed/finished, I will make a new poll and will ask the users if they think the relation features of Viewer and donated money is fine, or if the bountry should not be paid.
I dont want that at the end any single user feels that he paid for something that is not worth the money.
Thank you for all your hard work, for peanut pay really. Could you or would you move the project to Haiku-port or a similar site. Maybe get more help from other interested developers.
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