Re: proposed modules

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

Jonathan Blandford wrote:

> danilo gnome org (Danilo Šegan) writes:
>
>  
>
> > Yesterday at 12:56, Jonathan Blandford wrote:
> >
> >    
> >
> > > Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org> writes:
> > >
> > >      
> > >
> > > > Do gpdf and ggv play well with gnopernicus and GOK? In other terms, if
> > > > evince does not work nicely with these tools, will it be a regression or
> > > > not?
> > > >        
> > > Neither of them export their content at all via ATK.  However, evince
> > > basically uses stock GTK+ widgets so I would expect it to work just as
> > > well with gok as any other GNOME application.
> > >      
> > And will it be easier to add a11y support to evince?  I guess it
> > would, since it allows text search (so it can already make one
> > sequence out of text which will be more usable with gok/gnopernicus, I
> > think).
> >
> > If it's true, it would be another big reason to use evince, since it
> > would have better potential even in accessibility, and it would have
> > my vote.
> >    
>
> It will be much easier to add a11y to poppler.  We just need someone to
> find the time to do it.
>  
"Easier" than what?  Adding it to the old xpdf?  Or adding it to 
closed-source acroread?

Getting the text out in the form of strings, which is already apparently 
feasible, is a first step, but more is needed, such as caret navigation, 
text layout info, and the ability to get the 'accessibility' info from a 
PDF file's markup (accessibility features were added to the PDF format 
around version 1.4).  There does seem to be a feature-documentation 
problem with PDF as was inferred earlier.

Adobe is currently working on accessibility too, for their proprietary 
Linux acroread.  In line with recent discussions, I certainly don't want 
to discourage them from doing this excellent work, though I agree that 
our free PDF reader should be accessible as well, and there are 
certainly accessibility advantages to working on an open source base too.

regards

Bill

> Thanks,
> -Jonathan 
>