qpdfview

smooth text-selection support like evince and font display improvement adding cairo graphic backend support

Asked by Haylon Zhao

thanks for your perfect work, this is the best pdf reader on linux i ever see.
i would like to ask if qpdfview can support smooth text-selection like evince.
also, i know evince uses poppler cairo backend and wonder if qpdfview can support it.
current poppler developers doesn't allow Qt4 bindings to support cairo backend because of "politically controversial".
but here is the patchsets rejected by poppler developers to help solve it:
https://github.com/giddie/poppler-qt4-cairo-backend
here is the dispute about it:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25240
hopefully this helps.

Best regards, haylon

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Adam Reichold (adamreichold) said : 		#1

Hello Haylon,

Thanks for your interest in the development of qpdfview. I am glad that you find the program useful. Improved text selection is on the to-do list and there is a wishlist bug "https://bugs.launchpad.net/qpdfview/+bug/958634" to track its progress. It is technically feasible but there just has not been time to implement it yet.

Concerning using the Cairo backend from the Qt4 frontend: While I agree that there is no compelling technical reason not to include an optional code path to use the CairoOutputDev in the Qt4 frontend, the Poppler maintainers have decided against it and I abide by that decision. Also, IMHO the real problem is the lack of work on the ArthurOutputDev, the use of which would have numerous integration benefits for Qt-based applications besides improved rendering quality. So long story short, qpdfview can support it, if Poppler decides to support it. (Meaning I will not try to ship a patched Poppler library or something like that which IMHO goes against how free software is supposed to work.)

Best regards, Adam.

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