[poppler] [REMINDER] Poppler 0.6 release

Albert Astals Cid aacid at kde.org
Sat Aug 25 13:21:28 PDT 2007


A Dissabte 25 Agost 2007, Carlos Garcia Campos va escriure:
> El sáb, 25-08-2007 a las 11:50 +0200, Albert Astals Cid escribió:
> > We planned 1st september, but i'm not going to be around that weekend so
> > we either release 30 august (5 days from now) or 3rd september (9 days
> > from now)
> >
> > I vote from 3rd september.
>
> Ok to me.
>
> > I know Carlos wanted to introduce changes to glib and Pino to qt. Send
> > them NOW!
>
> yeah, I'll do it the next week.
>
> > Also does anyone if Julien is around, we need him to have a look at
> > http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12013 and say if that is
> > needed or if we can just remove the declaration from the .h
> >
> > Also there are two things i want to discuss:
> >
> > *** "unwrapping" of ff,fi, etc ligatures ***
> > I don't want to do it, but that's only me, there seems to be lots of
> > votes on the other direction, what do you, Carlos, Jeff, Pino, krh say?
> > And any of the yes voters will send a patch? ;-)
>
> Honestly, I don't have a strong opinion about this.
>
> > *** beign more lax about ending %%EOF ***
> > Lately there seem to be some pdf around that do not end with %%EOF. That
> > sucks as they break the check i introduced for %%EOF beign present and
> > are not REAL pdf.
> > This check is not really needed for "finished" files, but on kpdf/okular
> > we have that handy "Check for file changes" that reloads the document
> > once the file has changed (useful for latex people), the problem with
> > that is that you know it changed, but not that it will not change
> > anymore, so we often ended up reloading incomplete files that randomly
> > crashed poppler.
> > So i introduced the %%EOF check to avoid that.
> > But it seems that is hurting us now, so we can remove the %%EOF check and
> > try to improve poppler not to crash on incomplete documents or leave it
> > that way and keep repeating our users that if it does not have an %%EOF
> > it's not a PDF and that they should bug the producer not the consumer of
> > the pdf file. Or any other suggestion?
>
> I wouldn't like okular/evince/whatever-viewer-depending-on-poppler users
> have to use acroread just because poppler crashes when acroread not.

Well, it does not crash, just refuses to load the file. But yeah, i agree it 
should be removed because as Krzysztof says educating users is not very easy.

> I would like to add another two things to discuss:
>
> *** ZapfDingbats fonts ***
>
> These fonts are used in documents with forms to display checkboxes and
> radio buttons symbols. Right now, fontconfig doesn't find the right font
> when asking for 'ZapfDingbats', which means that documents with forms
> (if they have checkboxes or radio buttons) don't work for most of the
> users. And it fails silently, when user clicks on a radio button or
> checkbox nothing happens. It seems that the problem should be fixed in
> every distro, so if we fix it in poppler it will never be fixed by
> distros. Actually I don't mind how is to blame, the truth is that
> interactive forms is one of the most important features of the new
> evince version and I'm sure it's very important in okular too, and it's
> currently broken. I tried to do the right thing so I commented it in
> fontconfig bugzilla[1] and filed a bug[2] to my distro (ubuntu) with no
> responses in both cases. My proposal for poppler 0.6 is try to figure
> out whether fontconfig will be able to find the right font with some
> "magic" in the configure script (using fc-match command). If it fails,
> we show a warning indicating that there is a problem in the fontconfig
> configuration that should be fixed, and we define a preprocessor macro
> indicating that the substitution has to be done by poppler (as a
> workaround). The changes in poppler are minimal, something like this:
>
> #ifdef SUBSTITUE_ZAPFDINGBATS
> if (strcmp (family, "ZapfDingbats") == 0) {
>   family ="Dingbats";
> }
> #endif

Sounds sensible enough, will you be able to produce such a patch?

> *** Remove splash dependency in glib bindings ***
>
> In other words, make glib bindings strictly depend on CairoOutputDev and
> remove all the #ifdef crap. This is something krh proposed for 0.6
> which, at this moment, I agree with. AFAIK most of the distros are
> already compiling poppler with cairo outputdev enabled, so the glib
> bindings are using cairo.

I don't use the glib bindings so i don't have much of a voice, but given the 
issues with the CairoOutputDev (you have been filing some bugs that yield 
empty/wrong pages on Cairo and work on Splash) i'm not sure it's really a 
good move. But i won't oppose if everyone else thinks it's a good move.

Albert

>
> [1] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6478#c12
> [2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fontconfig/+bug/130687




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