Another small post about new developments in Plasma Active 😉
An important use case for tablet is of course Ebook reading (being them pdf, epub or whatever).
KDE offers a very complete document reading application, that supports a wide variety of formats: Okular. It is of course an application optimized for desktop usage and does a very good job at that, but what is less known is that Okular has a very good separation between the logic of document parsing and rendering, managing bookmarks, annotation etc and the ui itself.
It has been revealed very easy to do a set of QML bindings that let opening all the supported documents by the desktop version of Okular and render them on a component directly usable by QML, alongside a very simple touch friendly application.
This application represents the document as a stack of sheets, in which is possible to flick them around, pich zoom and switching pages with a swipe gesture. A side panel that can be dragged in (common UI pattern in Plasma Active) contains an overview of all the pages as a thumbnail grid.
It’s just the beginning as both the app and the reusable QML components still don’t have support or UI for more complex things like custom bookmarks and annotations, that will eventually come in future versions.
Heyhey there! Looking great already! 🙂 Just wanted to ask, have you come up with a sensible metaphor for “put pages back onto the stack that i flicked away before”… you know, navigating backwards in the document 🙂 Looks pretty nifty, just couldn’t quite work that one out in my head… 🙂
Each time I see in the video how you are moving the page with the finger or zooming in-out I feel that Okular is going to crash in that moment, I mean, you can see the next page in background and produces a lot of distraction (as I said I though each that Okular was crashing in that moment I saw the second page, is a strage sensation). You should be able to see another page only when you are doing the action of change page, otherwise I feel that the port to plasma active is incomplete/broken.
Anyway, I liked the rest of the demostration 🙂
What is the prognosis on improving the pinch to zoom performance? It almost looks like the okular rendering backend is trying to keep up with re-rendering the page at each incremental frame of zooming instead of simply zooming the already rendered output and then updating the rendering when the pinch touch is released …
Very nice! In which hardware is it running? A vivaldi prototype or an exopc? I have an exopc running the last Active stable release, and Okular is not as smooth in the video, I think.
I hope that ocular active will remember the last page that was opened and in next opening the same book, or file okular active will bring for us that last page 😀
> I hope that ocular active will remember the last page that was opened and in next opening the same book, or file okular active will bring for us that last page 😀
Yep it does 😉
This is really impressive. Obviously, a reader like Okular will be the heart of a tablet. Also, Okular is one of the best libre readers out there. But I didn’t see a demonstration of this yet and I am more impressed than I anticipated. Nice work! 🙂
his is really impressive. Obviously, a reader like Okular will be the heart of a tablet. Also, Okular is one of the best libre readers out there. But I didn’t see a demonstration of this yet and I am more impressed than I anticipated. Nice work! 🙂