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

[Martin Spacek]

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?

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