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don't want to add too many options to PDFRead
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aww.... come on. Don't let your windows software get bogged down by the shortcomings of the command line. (I know this is the reason because you've mentioned it elsewhere.) The whole point of a GUI is that it allows you to effectively support and present many more features. If you don't want to add them to the linux version, that's fine.
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That's a bit out of context -- I don't want to add too many options
unrelated to PDFRead (as the ones related to unpaper would be). In fact, I'd say that the command line has a better UI than any GUI, but that's something that everyone has [highly divergent] opinions on
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I don't really want to get into the GUI thing for now, I want to focus on features
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It's kind of hard to separate the two, seeing as it's hard to add features to the command line (and you're already claiming to have hit the ceiling).
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Uhm .. not really. I can (and will) add many more features related to the
core functionality of PDFRead. I've not reached any kind of ceiling, it's just that I want to keep the current code lean and mean -- it's much easier to maintain stuff that way. I'd like to do a mini-rewrite (like I mentioned in the other thread) but that's not really necessary at all (I'm just very finicky when it comes to code quality).
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I know the real reason you don't want to do a gui. It's because you're unfamiliar with how to do it and it does take quite a bit of work. (I know, because that's the exact same reason pdfrasterfarian stayed text-based.)
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Now that's right on the mark
I don't want to take the effort of maintaining a GUI, when it is much simpler to maintain a CUI. I have written GUIs (although now I do mostly web-based at work), but it takes much more code and effort. As a comparison -- all of PDFRead is ~620 lines, while the GUI code + configuration is ~518 lines (and that's very short, mind you).
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You're right, some of the options will not make sense unless you know what is actually happening during all the various stages. I'll make a document about it and post it on the website sometime tomorrow.
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Eh... a document isn't really the right solution. No one reads those things. A program should be its own document. I understand that your installer approach presents big limitations, but on the other hand it should have strong facilities to create a "wizard" to ask questions next to explanations similar to pdfrasterfarian.
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Point taken, but some of the options will require you to understand the process and how that option fits in it. And yes, the installer approach does has its limitations -- but I got it up in less than a day, and it's good enough for everyday tasks. The folks who want to customize to the Nth degree can always use the command line...
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The best way I can think of is to allow a page spec for conversion and convert for those pages only. ie. that way, you can convert a single page and see how it looks finally. Don't know how it will integrate with the windows GUI, though.
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It shouldn't be a problem if you can just call a command in the middle rather than the end.
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I'm not sure I get what you mean.