PDF and cairo/gtk love
While investigating why Beagle wasn't finding some PDF files in my Download directory, I tried to create a PDF file from scratch to check if PDF indexing was working properly. So, I launched gedit and write a small test file and printed it to PDF. Unfortunately, I discovered its text output was garbage. I thought : it might be a cairo problem, did more tests and I saw my mistake : gedit (in fact, gtksourceview, see bug 375886) is still using the old libgnomeprint(ui) library, which is not generating text-readable PDF, unlike cairo PDF backend. Same think for gnome-dictionnary (fortunately, evolution has been ported). So, this is a call for maintainers : please, please, try to port your applications to GtkPrint from gtk+ 2.10.x, it give better consistency to GNOME and moreover, your application will generate text parseable PDF files !
And for those wondering if I find out about my beagle bug, not yet.. It is probably caused by using a non-UTF8 locale (I'm old school), with directory using non ASCII / locale-encoded filename. Epiphany has also a similar problem (not reported yet, I'd like to cook a patch) as well as Baobab (see bug 437478).
Metisse
Good news on Metisse front : Insitu got funding (through INRIA) for a Metisse job position. Sorry for non french people, it is more for young graduated folks, located near Paris. More informations are available (in french) on Inria website here (job position) and here (more general informations about this kind of job). Hurry up, application must be sent before May 23, 2007.
Funny UI
Thanks to Martin, I hear last Wednesday about Reactable. This is very interesting and moreover, it is free software. Too bad they didn't come last year to do a demo at GUADEC, since this team is located in Barcelona :(
Saturday, May 19, 2007
PDF and cairo/gtk love, Metisse job and funny UI
Labels: General
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
All english posts
Comment from Emmanuele Bassi:
ReplyDeleteporting the dictionary to gtkprint is on my roadmap; I was waiting for gedit to move, so I could steal the code. ;-)
Well, don't wait too much, Emmanuele, since porting gedit requires porting gtksourceview first to GtkPrint ;)
ReplyDeleteComment from dBera:
ReplyDeleteAbout the beagle bug, can you find the file using beagle-query (the command line tool) ? I presume you changed the pdf output to create a proper text-parseable pdf.
Thanks Debajyoti (nice to see you're a Mandriva user ;)
ReplyDeleteI tried to use beagle-dump-index without any success but I didn't thought about trying to run a query using beagle-query
Running beagle-query --mime application/pdf didn't return any result for files located in the locale-encoded directory where I have a lot of PDF. So, as expected, there is a problem with this kind of directories..
Comment from dBera:
ReplyDeleteYeah boy, I am long time Mandra(ke/iva) user. Back those days I didn't like RH menu. Can you believe that simple a reason made me start with M and continue there after ;-) ?
Can we work on the problem with locale-encoded directories - either via a bugzilla bug or I can personally take care of it? I am not personally aware of this, I would like to know about the setup. Does the name of the file or directory show up in the log file ? A good test would be to touch the file and observe what shows up in the log. Please reply at dbera.web at gmail. Thanks.
beagle bug filled as http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=440458
ReplyDelete