Re: [libreoffice-design] pdf import design docs?

Hi Larry,

        First - really great to have you looking at that code ! =)

On 10/05/2016 04:10 PM, Larry Evans wrote:
> I'm trying to understand how the pdf import code works.
> I've tried looking at the code; however, that's hard to
> follow; hence, I was hoping there was some sort of design
> document explaining somewhat how the code works.

        Second - the design list is really for User Experience / developer
interaction, and this seems like a real gnarly coding problem - so I've
re-sent it to the dev-list =)

> TIA for any pointers.

        Sure - so the PDF import is a bit of a mess; it currently spawns a
remote process using poplar to parse the PDF, and then extracts (via a
simple text protocol) data from poplar's rendering to re-constitute into
internal ODF callbacks to produce an internal document; at least -
that's if I got it right =)

        Poplar/xpdf has a GPL license and so requires all this silliness.

        In general - it would be -way- better to pick up something like eg.
pdfium - and add a rendering front-end there to match first, the same
protocol (but we can do this in-process), and subsquently to simplify
and factor lots of that madness out =) PDFium seems to be gaining
traction in browsers (Chrome + Firefox) and so on.

        Does that make sense ? out of interest, what bug or mis-feature are you
interested in there ? are you looking at:

        filter/source/pdf
and     sdext/source/pdfimport

        ? =)

        ATB,

                Michael.

-- 
michael.meeks@collabora.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot