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.