Re: Evince as universal "Viewer"

[Jonathan Blandford <jrb redhat com>]

Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM> writes:

> As an aside, but I think an important one, we (i.e. GNOME maintainers,
> evince, eog, etc.) need to try running evince with GOK and gnopernicus
> (and testing keynav, theming, etc.) to see where it stands before
> seriously considering adding it to the GNOME desktop.  Same goes for
> any new application, but content viewers accessibility is especially
> vital.

Hi Bill,

Evince uses stock widgets almost exclusively, so it will need tweaking
at most to work well with GOK/gnopernicus.

There is, of course, the giant exception to this, which is that the
actual document isn't accessible.  For some of the backends (djvu, ps,
tiff), I see this problem as essentially intractable, barring liberal
use of OCR software[1].

However, the story isn't nearly as grim for pdf documents.  libpoppler
gives us a way to extract the text from the documents and determine its
extents.  While that's still doesn't make it accessible, it's a very
necessary step toward that.  I'd love if someone took on this problem,
as it shouldn't be that hard to get it going.

Thanks,
-Jonathan

[1] Which sounds like a pretty fun project, come to think of it.