In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: KViewShell is renamed Ligature. Okular gets support for Text and Line annotations. KSame and Konquest start their conversion to SVG graphics. Marble gets enhanced support for presenting and displaying geographical data interactively, and showing national flags. Mailody, the alternative email client, continues to develop at a rapid pace. Telepathy support in Kopete starts to emerge from experiment towards a usable implementation. Kile gets scripting support, with improvements to scripting across KOffice. KPresenter receives export to text document (OpenDocument) functionality. Improvements in the Magnatune music store facility in Amarok.
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Comments
This is what I call "user support"... ;-)
> now okular wants to get in kdegraphics, but i would say NO. sorry, but two apps,
> not just DOING the same, but also LOOKING the same and WORKING the same is just
> plain silly.
Your points are quite pointless. If we would have patched the kpdf to be okular directly in trunk, okular would _already_ be in kdegraphics.
> one of the two can get in, and Ligature was simply first...
ROTFL. I didn't know in KDE there were the rules "first come, first served" and "the first is better".
Thanks for enlight me dude ;-)
But there is the rule "never change a working system (unless a change makes things miles better)". While both Okular and Ligature are great, none of them is miles better than the other, so why change?
Please do not forget, by requesting to have Okular in kdegraphics you are implicitly asking to remove Ligature. So please say this out loud and stay with the answers :) And then, there are advantages for being a member of the extragear collection! And after all distribution are free to decide which program they install by default.
KDE is not about better marketing, but about better technology. So decisions should be based on the latter.
> none of them is miles better than the other
having seen both, i would personally judge this to be an incorrect statement. i know which one of the two has historically served me better and which right now provides more interesting features: kpdf which became okular.
> by requesting to have Okular in kdegraphics you are implicitly asking to
> remove Ligature
this is a very good point. i don't see anything wrong with this either. as you said:
> here are advantages for being a member of the extragear collection
now KPDF always did a great job for me as well, but i tried both in trunk, and they sure look rather evenly to me. Ligature is seriously faster, and has a working text selection. and Okular has the annotation support (which doesn't work great, yet).
anyway, i'd love to see the authors meet and talk about this, or something. try to find a common ground. they seem to want (almost) the same thing, as the apps DO almost the same thing in almost the same way, looking the same. it's hard to imagine there being big technical disputes which can't be solved...
> and they sure look rather evenly to me
i did a fairly extensive survey of both of them the other day and there are significant functionality gaps that remain. see my email on k-c-d about this if you're curious.
> Ligature is seriously faster
i haven't noticed this. in what ways did it feel faster for you?
> a working text selection
as does okular. i did find a bug in this feature the other day. i told pino about it so i assume it'll get fixed up here.
> i'd love to see the authors meet and talk about this
agreed.
> big technical disputes which can't be solved
at this point i don't think it has anything to do with technical issues.
> > a working text selection
> as does okular. i did find a bug in this feature the other day. i told pino
> about it so i assume it'll get fixed up here.
Try it with multicolumn text, and you will see that there is still quite some
difference.
Greetings,
Wilfried Huss
indeed. select the text in okular, watch your cpu and see it lag behind your mouse... and then try to copy the text anywhere (doesn't work, it's only selecting).
but the ability to highlight a piece of text (wich is saved over close/open) in okular is great...
>> Ligature is seriously faster
> i haven't noticed this. in what ways did it feel faster for you?
just scroll and see your cpu usage. SLOWLY scrolling brings KPDF to full 100% cpu, and if you use autoscroll (shift-downarrow) it isn't even able to load the next page (on a 2 ghz proc!) before you're almost scrolled past it. okular does things a bit better, but start both ligature and okular, and scroll. in ligature, the cpu goes barely up, okular goes to 100% immediately.
I also love the smart behavior of ligature when hitting space (one page up/down, smoothly scrolling and with a red line), in okular i love the way you see where you'r pageview is...
anyway, i think KDE should probably start some kind of competition between them. Only one can get in KDE 4, and the best will win. in the end, let the TWG decide who won.
if they're smart, they'll re-use as much as possible from each other's code base, giving features to ligature and speedups to okular....
you're right, okular was Kpdf and ligature is just the new name of kviewshell. so what do you think, should we give users two apps which can do almost exactly the same? should one be removed/left out? or should the developers at least TRY to find some common ground, at least share as much as possible or something?
I think the developers should stop making this a contest on who has the longest d* and start working together like adults.
There is room for only one of them in kde proper.
You forget to consider one very important aspect of Okular, even if it was a sumer of code project it not a new project. It's a extention and continus development of the good old KPdf. It's developed under a new name since it now does more than PDFs.
Not that it really matters, but Ligature/Kviewshell also predates KPDF
by a couple of years.
> just checked them both. Ligature is seriously faster than Okular, and it's
> text selection works. on the other hand, Okular has the annotations and stuff
> (tough it's not that great yet, and slow). Okular shows nicely with a red
> square where you are in the document, but the thumbnail preview 'jumps' while
> it moves smoothly in Ligature.
Thank you for trying out Ligature.
There is also a version of Ligature for KDE3 which is functionally equal
with the KDE4 version, only more stable. We are trying to make a release
of this version in the next 2 months. So that also KDE3 gets a decent
multi-format document reader.
Until then it can be found in svn at:
http://websvn.kde.org/branches/work/kviewshell-0.7/
Greetings,
Wilfried Huss (Ligature maintainer)
Nice! Nice to see these features come to KDE3, which will be shipped for quite a long time still.
Hello,
as far as I see, there are substantial differences in Ligature and oKular when
it comes to DVI and PDF files. I feel that these are quite important for a
number of people.
Correct me if I am wrong, but it seems that oKular does not support the
following features
DVI:
- inverse and forward search, an important feature for people writing TeX
documents, and an important feature of, e.g. the kile editor that uses
kdvi/kviewshell
- it seems that oKular uses old-fashioned Metafont fonts, instead of modern
Type1 or TrueType
- Exporting DVI files to other formats (Text, PS, PDF, ...)
- Graphic file inclusion
DJVU:
- removing/inserting pages
PS:
- removing/inserting pages
- editing PDF metadata
PDF:
- setting of page backgrounds
- removing/inserting pages
- editing PDF metadata
- inverse and forward search, as with DVI, for people using the TeX
typesetting system
Best,
Stefan.
Are these feature easy to port from one app to the other?
on a more positive note:
LOVE to the kdegames developers!!! great work on konquest (i love that app, and the fact it didn't scale has alwasy been an annoyance. now it's great, even tough it's not yet finished). same with kpat and kmahjongg, ksame, and the others. it's really amazing how good they look ;-)
and WHY don't i get lots of comments on this? i mean, talking about ligiture and okular might be nice, but this is worth some comments. they are doing a wonderfull job, really. every few days i update my KDE 4 svn, to see what they've been doing, and things start to look better, get new functionality, get faster etc etc.
again: LOVE!
and peace to the okular and ligiture ppl... i didn't mean to hurt anybody, both apps are a great work. too good, actually, i wouldn't want to be in the shoes of the ppl having to choose one of these. i'd rather see them work out their (must be few) differences...
Thanks, THAT will give us even more energy and motivation.
Well, seems like whining and complaining is much more fun for these people than applauding the devs doing such great jobs in providing first class software to the users.
So: A big Thank You to all participants !
Well, now it's finished. There is also a SVG background, a nicer grid...
I switched to QGraphicsView instead of a custom QWidget, that's making the creation of effects far easier. But the commit happened too late for this SVN commit digest.
The switch to QGraphicsView is really important for instance, prepare for surprises in any other game switching to it. Take something simple, the SVG background. It wasn't possible with the custom QWidget... Ok, possible but hard. Now the problem is not : "how to do", it's "what to do".
Screenshot : http://www.pinaraf.info/konquestQGV.png
BTW, I'd like to add something : the hidden work, mostly done by Inge Wallin, is extremely important... It's not just "separation of gameboard -> gamelogic, gameview". It means that later we'll be able to have for instance multiple-leve AI players.
i must be doing something wrong, then, if i click 'end round' for the first turn, the game is finished in a few seconds and i don't get a chance to play anything at all :D
but the looks are finished, and it's great indeed.
man, i'm looking forward to KDE 4 :D
:)
The look is far to be finished, i expect to have something better at the end. You should take the screenshot as a work in progress... And if the limiting factor is the time of course (i have a real/money job for the food...), KDE4 is not for tomorrow.
/trunk/playground/base/guidance/powermanager:
New icons thanks to Nuno and Ken of Oxygen fame, remove pid when registering power-manager with a dirty hack
Errrr...
It looks an almost exact copy of the Winamp icon..
And the text in the battery applet even resemble your name when power is plugged in!
That's funny! They're copying you!
LOL. You made my day with that joke.
I was there (at Dublin) when he draw it, and it was not a copy.
I saw the program Kat listed under the buzz section of this digest, however, according to kat's wikipedia article ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kat_Desktop_Search_Environment ), the project is dead.
Which makes me wonder, what exactly is the current status of kat?
I haven't seen regular commits to Kat for a long time, so I am assuming that Kat is either 'dead' or 'on hold'.
Happily however, there is a lot being done for Strigi, which at this point in time looks to have the best chance of becoming the de-facto search solution for KDE 4 desktops.