1. Evince Hackfest

Strasbourg, July 23-25 2014

Primary contact: GermanPooCaamano
Secondary contact: CarlosGarciaCampos

1.1. Relevant GNOME team

Evince developers
Accessibility team
Design team

1.2. Description

We want to work on accelerating the development of Evince in areas like: improve accessibility support on PDF documents and Evince overall, implement tiling in Poppler and Evince to support infinite zoom, improve support for PDF annotations in both Poppler and Evince, improve the API documentation of Evince libraries, and review and integrate pending patches.

Our plan is having the hackfest right before GUADEC, so can leave room for keep working in the following days. In addition, if new issues arise during the hackfest that require other hackers, we could contact them during GUADEC and continue working the remaining days of Conference/BOFs/Hackfests.

1.2.1. Agenda, goals

• Annotations
  • Add support for multiple types of annotations, with their respective interactions
    • in Evince: highlight, underline, strike out, lines, circles, squares
    • in Poppler and Evince: caret symbol, multimedia, ink.
  • Improve interaction for moving, editing and hiding annotations
  • Create custom widgets for sticky notes annotations instead of windows that behave weird
• Accessibility
  • General

    • Debug and stop the "g_object_unref: assertion 'G_IS_OBJECT (object)'" error spewage (is a gtk+ bug, 733610)

  • Keyboard navigation issues:

    • More caret navigation support (724273)

    • The caret sometimes gets stuck when arowing (733597)

    • Problems when selecting multiple pages (but not the entire document) at once via the keyboard

    • Links should be Tab-focusable (701722)

  • Form field accessibility:
    • Checkboxes and radio buttons need to emit object:state-changed:focused and object:state-changed:checked
    • Children of combo boxes need to be exposed to assistive technologies

    • Embedded objects need to be exposed to assistive technologies via AtkText (701737)

    • Embedded objects should implement AtkHyperlink (701785)

    • Parents of embedded objects need to implement AtkHypertext (701786)

• Forms

  • There are some long-standing bugs in Evince and Popler that need to be fixed to get more decent PDF form support, see Bug 564153 for example.

• Rework evince UI.
  • The UI has been recently been reworked in Gnome 3.8. As a result, some edges are not very rounded yet. Evince need focus on improving the design, specially on some upcoming features like adding annotations

• Refactoring the comics backend to use libarchive instead of third party commands (720742)

• Add support for tile rendering
• Integrate patches like the new recent View, smooth scrolling, among others.

Possible other topics:

• Add basic JavaScript support

  • Required for handling some PDF forms
• Add dual-screen presentation support
  • Integrate work from GSoC 2013, instead of using external files, attach them as annotations
• Add new backends for DVI and PS that convert documents to PDF on the fly

1.2.2. Measuring your success

• Get the developers on the same page to implement the items on the agenda
  • Either by finished them during the hackfest or leave them in a good state to integrate them before 3.14 or 3.16

1.2.3. Reports

Here we will link all the blog posts published during or after the hackfest, including information about the work done.

• GUADEC 2014: the aftermath by Giselle Reis

• Evince Hackfest by Carlos Garcia Campos

• Evince hackfest taking place in Strasbourg ahead of GUADEC gnome.org news item

1.2.4. Attendees

For requesting for sponsorship, follow the instructions from this page.

1.2.5. Costs

• Venue: Provided by GUADEC organization. Thanks to Alexandre Franke.
• Accommodation: Same for GUADEC (hopefully, to be confirmed). Travel might not be required for the hackfest if attendants apply for GUADEC sponsorship. It would be required only extra days of accommodation plus food (if possible).

1.2.6. Current sponsors

• None at this moment

1.3. How to get there

• Follow the instructions for GUADEC, the venue will be the same.

1.4. Accommodation and food

• Ditto.