[poppler] Kickstarter campaign for annotation support in evince and poppler-glib

[Albert Astals Cid]

El Dimecres, 31 de juliol de 2013, a les 17:49:45, Martin Spacek va escriure:
> Hello Jose Alliste and the evince and poppler lists,
> 
> Somehow, I wasn't notified of replies to my rant on bugzilla about
> annotation support in evince, back in January:
> 
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=692655#c16
> 
> Jose, you replied:
>  > You are welcome to provide patches/start campaigns, etc, to get
>  > annotation
>  > support into Evince. This is a volunteer project and we use any help we
>  > can
>  > get (and if we can't use it, you are always free to fork, evince is gpl)
>  > 
>  > Anyway, this is deviating from the issue. We can continue the
>  > conversation
>  > privately if you want/need so.( jose.aliste at gmail.com)
> 
> I wish I could provide patches. I certainly have the motivation: I'm
> bothered by the lack of full annotation support on an almost daily basis.
> But, I have no experience with glib, only very minimal experience with big
> C/C++ projects, and no time to devote to changing that situation. I'm a
> Python man, and way past due finishing up my PhD. But I was serious about
> putting some money into a Kickstarter (or Indiegogo?) campaign.
> 
> I can think of least a few issues that would have to be resolved before a
> fundraising campaign could get off the ground:
> 
> Issue #1: what might a Kickstarter campaign promise exactly? Acrobat Pro,
> PDF Xchange, or Foxit -like support for adding, editing, and saving
> annotations back to the open PDF, with some of the more basic tools, like
> highlighting, text annots (box and free), and drawing available on a
> toolbar, in the menu bar and context menu, and perhaps via keyboard
> shortcuts? Different cursor icons for different annotation tools?
> 
> Issue #2: who would promise to do the work, and therefore get paid? What
> kind of timeline might we expect? Ideally, a currently volunteering senior
> dev or devs, with plenty of experience with the code base, would devote
> themselves to it full-time for a consecutive period, and get paid only if
> certain features land by a certain time.
> 
> Issue #3: what should the total minimum pledged amount be?
> 
> Issue #4: how would we resolve conflicts between the stated goals of a
> potential Kickstarter campaign, and the opinions of existing devs that
> aren't employed by the campagin?
> 
> Obviously, the main single reward for all levels of monetary contributions
> would be full PDF annotation support in evince and poppler-glib. Maybe
> another reward level could be special mention in the About box, listed in
> decreasing order of contribution, above a certain minimum amount.
> 
> However, my biggest worry is that GNOME has been going down the path of
> removing tried and true UI components, like menu bars and toolbars, all
> seemingly for the sake of change, with an air that the GNOMEs know best,
> users be damned, and that giving the (power-ish) user some flexibility and
> customizability are somehow a bad thing. Before you ask for references,
> whether the preceding sentence is true or not is irrelevant. The perception
> among users is very real.
> 
> So, I worry that a Kickstarter campaign for evince and poppler-glib might be
> good money and good intentions chasing the wrong project. But, I'd very
> much like to be proven wrong. The point with a Kickstarter campaign is that
> users could put their money where their mouths are, and speak in a voice
> that's a lot harder to dismiss (assuming they can come to some kind of
> consensus on a desired feature set, at least for annotations).
> 
> As I stated in the bug report, I'm willing to personally commit US$200
> towards annotation support in evince, assuming the above issues can be
> hammered out. More importantly, I'm absolutely certain that countless other
> academics, especially those in the harder sciences which are more likely to
> run Linux, would be equally willing to contribute monetary support. There
> would be many places to advertise such a campaign, and I think it could be
> very successful, since the audience is so large. Then of course,
> non-academic Linux users would also find full annotation support useful -
> perhaps not as desperately so as academic users, but they'd provide a
> vastly bigger pool of potential contributors.
> 
> Thoughts?

Have you tried Okular? It does some/most of the annotation things you mention 
in its latest versions if paired with a new enough poppler.

Cheers,
  Albert

> 
> --
> Martin Spacek
> gmane-at-mspacek-dot-mm-dot-st
> http://mspacek.github.io/
> 
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