From kde-active Sun Dec 23 00:18:23 2012 From: Inge Wallin Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2012 00:18:23 +0000 To: kde-active Subject: Improving the book reading experience with KDE tech Message-Id: <201212230118.23727.inge () lysator ! liu ! se> X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-active&m=135622194219437 In just a few weeks Calligra 2.6 will be released, and with that the first version of Calligra Author. The first version of Author will be very like Words but it has a focus on the needs of a book writer rather than, say, a report writer or a memo writer. Therefore we expect Words and Author to start to diverge in the feature set soon. Version 2.6 of Calligra Author has support for creating ebooks in EPUB2 and MOBI formats. Both of these formats are rather simple and support text with various formatting and pictures. Okular has a generator for EPUB which makes it a decent basic ebook reader. However, Calligra Author 2.7 will start producing EPUB3 files which are much more complex. I want Author to become *the* way to create teaching materials with dynamic contents (animations, multimedia, etc) but most of that will be meaningless if there is no way to read the generated files. EPUB3 is huge so Author 2.7 will start out by supporting embedded videos and embedded math formulas using MathML. And this is where Okular falls short. The current generator does not support more than very basic formatting and math formulas is not part of that. And the whole API of Okular does not support anything but static content. In the long run, this lack will diminish the value of Plasma Active and therefore I have also added the Active ML as a recipient. Call to action ------------------- I would like to put together a small task force to enhance Okular with a better generator for EPUB as well as enhance the general engine to also allow dynamic contents. The first version should support video but in the future i can easily imagine other things like embedded scripted animations or 3D objects in X3Dom and so on. I have looked at the code of Okular and it looks entirely doable. I could probably manage myself but then there would be no other work on Calligra Author for the 2.7 cycle and that would be bad. I think this is an important task for PA4 and therefore Okular Active. Any takers? -Inge _______________________________________________ Active mailing list Active@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/active