[Sugar-devel] Request to add webkitgtk as a external dependency

[Martin Sevior]

On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 4:11 AM, Sayamindu Dasgupta<sayamindu at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 7:44 PM, Benjamin M.
> Schwartz<bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
>> Sayamindu Dasgupta wrote:
>>> This mail is a request/proposal to add webkitgtk as an external
>>> dependency for either Sugar or Read
>>
>> I object strongly either way.
>>
>> The last thing Sugar needs is a hard dependency on _both_ major browser
>> engines.  Moreover, it's entirely unnecessary in this case.  ePub is a
>> simple XML format.  You can convert it to HTML (or PDF or ...) using
>> Calibre [1],
>
> Calbre is QT based, and uses QTWebkit for rendering.
>
>> or view it directly through gecko using an extension like
>> OpenBerg Lector [2].  It might even be possible to view it using hulahop
>> without any fancy extensions, just by adding an appropriate stylesheet.
>>
>
> OpenBerg Lector works only for version 2.x of Firefox, and the last
> release happened two years back. I'm not sure if anyone is maintaining
> or not.
>
> I initially tried out whatever I wanted to do with Gecko, however, it
> looks like performance can be degraded quite a bit with larger books.
> To ensure proper pagination (the current form of Read depends on the
> document being properly and consistently broken up into pages), I need
> to pre-render the entire book beforehands to get an idea of the
> dimensions (under a predefined set of graphics settings, so that the
> dimensions come out in a device/screen independent manner). However,
> with large books like War and Peace (which consists of more than 350
> XHTML files), the basic pre-rendering code takes around 18 seconds
> with Gecko (using Hulahop) and around 2 seconds with Webkit. This is
> on my desktop machine - I did not try the comparison on an XO-1. All
> the pages are quite simple, with no images, and minimalistic
> formatting.

<snip>

Out of interest, did you think of using libabiword? We do pagination,
equations via mathm, imagesl etc.
If the format is a simal xml like thing it is would not be too hard to
import it.

libabiword is already shipped with with sugar of course and you'd get
all sorts of other goodies for free. Immediate collaboration,
annotations and mark up of favourite passages etc.

Cheers

Martin