iLiad Community iPDF - Patch submissions

[jharker]

Historically, many people have proposed improvements to the pdf viewer. Many different versions of the viewer have been released, each with different features. To help solve this babel of versions, I propose that we create one centralized community version of the iPDF viewer, containing as many of the patches as can be comfortably combined together.

I'll volunteer to maintain this distribution, at least to start with. If you have a patch that you would like considered for inclusion, post it in this forum. Please put ONLY patch submissions in this thread.

Required Submission Components :

1. A clean patch for the iRex official iPDF source from subversion, svn 25. This patch should implement ONLY YOUR OWN modification when applied to a fresh download of the svn 25 source.
2. Clean patches for any other libraries, if necessary. For example, wpd's new "column viewer" mod requires a patch to the poppler library as well. Specify what source code the patch should be applied to.
3. Any other files that are required by the patch.
4. Full documentation of what new features and functionality the patch(es) add, including buttons that are added to the toolbar and what they do, and extra functionality added to hardware buttons.

Submission Guidelines :

1. Patches should apply equally to landscape and portrait mode, continuous and page modes.
2. Patches should not modify the default startup behavior of iPDF, except for loading previously-saved user changes.
3. Please be sure your patch is tested and as bug-free as possible.

Reference :

• In Linux, you can get a copy of the current svn source using the command

  svn co http://developer.irexnet.com/repo/applications/ipdf/trunk

• In Linux, to make a proper patch file named my.patch, you can use this command (or something similar):

  diff -r -u -N -b trunk trunk_new > my.patch

Those are the requirements to start with. In addition, I would like for mods to add new buttons to the toolbar, rather than using the hardware buttons; but I have no idea how this is done, or if this is even possible. If anyone would like to describe how to add toolbar buttons, that would be wonderful.

I will not necessarily include every modification in the community iPDF viewer. I may decline to include a patch for many reasons, including poorly written code, buggy code, lack of testing, irreconcilable conflicts with other patches, and excessive complexity of the UI. Having said that, I hope to see lots of great patches and I will include as many as I can!

Please put ONLY patch submissions in this thread. I will start a second thread for discussion of the community iPDF project and its component patches. Thanks!

[wpd]

These patches add a new column mode in addition to the page/contineous modes in portrait view to ipdf irex rev 25 / stock 2.11.

Please note that a pdf does not specify anything regarding textwords / lines / columns / flows. The poppler library, that is used by ipdf to render pdf files, has a textoutput device that makes use of a number of heuristics to determine words, lines and columns. This textoutput device is also used in the poppler tool pdf2text.

With a small interface adjustment in poppler (poppler.patch), ipdf can query poppler about rendered text columns (ipdf.patch).

Features:

• "column mode" icon is hidden under page/contineous mode when in portrait view
• Works best when zoomed in on a (set of) columns
• Every textbox with 2 lines or more, with the current rotation, is considered a column
• Short flipbar next/previous = move to next/previous column
• Long flipbar next/previous = move to next/previous page; first/last column
• Tap on column = move to tapped column
• Columns that are completely in view are skipped over when considering next/previous column. This allows you to read an entire portrait page be fore flipping, instead of flipping for each column individually.
• Current column is identified using a black rectangle; note that you can configure this away in the source. I left it in to allow ppl to see in what order columns are identified and processed.
• Extensive logging; try ipdf-nologging or configure the source to remove them.
• Column mode and current column are saved and loaded in manifests.

How to try:

ipdf
ipdf-nologging

These arm binaries have the modified poppler library linked in statically, i.e. you can give one of them a go by simply copying it to /usr/bin/ipdf.

When using ipdf, try

/sbin/syslogd -s 500 -b 0 -O log

and take a look at the file 'log' to see what it is doing.

Ps. the static linking clobbers a securityhandler in poppler. My guess is that password protected pdfs will fail with this ipdf. This goes away if you compile from the source (ipdf-column.tgz) and copy both the new poppler library and the new ipdf to your iliad.

[rincewind]

Here is a patch providing gestures and quick erase. I haven't tested it too much yet, but it does seem to work.

Limitations:
Not that many functions are defined, and the only directions recognized is left, right, up and down. So no diagonal lines here. :-D

To start a gesture:
Press and hold for a short second, then draw the gesture. The LED turns on if in gesture mode. If you wanted to draw one, but failed (no LED), stop and hold will turn the line into an erase line. This will delete the line, but also scribbles under the line...

Quick erase is just as before, draw something, but stop and hold still for a second before releasing. The line and lines that were passed will be deleted.

The pre-defined gestures are:
LEFT-UP: darker color
LEFT-DOWN: lighter color
RIGHT-UP: Thicker pen
RIGHT-DOWN: Thinner pen
RIGHT-DOWN-LEFT-UP (draw a box): Zoom in using the box (very cool!)
DOWN-UP: Refresh the screen

Any feedback from testing is very welcome!

Edit: Fixed a bug where the erase line on quick erase was not erased itself.
Edit2: This patch also provides saving pen settings to the manifest file and reading it on startup. I had forgotten all about that. :-)

/R