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

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

Hi Martin,

On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 7:02 PM, Martin Sevior<msevior at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>

Yes - I had considered using Abiword at a certain point. However,
Epubs are increasingly starting to take advantages of latest features
in CSS (a typical epub-file is normally metadata + content layout
directives + xhtml files + css files) like embedded font-faces, etc,
which are only available in the very latest versions of Gecko/Webkit.

Thanks,
Sayamindu



-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]