[Sugar-devel] Making Read read everything [WAS: Re: FBReader]

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 2:21 PM, Morgan Collett
<morgan.collett at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 00:16, Sayamindu Dasgupta <sayamindu at gmail.com> wrote:
>> [Summarizing and cleaning up the cruft of the older discussions]
>>
>> Hello all,
>> Currently, we have a number of ways to read ebooks (which includes a
>> variety of formats, starting from plaintext to PDF to archived HTML in
>> the form of epub, etc).. We have Read - which handles PDFs, DJVU, CBZ,
>> PS, etc. We have ReadEtext, which does a nice job with text files, and
>> the latest addition to the lot is an somewhat experimental activity
>> based on FBReader[1][2].
>>
>> SJ and I were wondering if it may make sense to try to unify these
>> activities in some way, so that the "Read" activity in Sugar can
>> handle all formats (going by the "verbs" concept that is central to
>> the Sugar concept). While the most elegant way to do this would be
>> perhaps to have dynamic backends for Read, which would be loaded on
>> demand, based on the format of the file being opened, this would be a
>> non trivial exercise. (to begin with, for example, there are subtle
>> differences with respect to pagination for different formats: eg,
>> PDF/DJVU offers a very clear distinction between pages, while this can
>> be quite flexible, or even non existent for a plain text file)
>>
>> Is there a easier way we can do this ? SJ suggests that we rename the
>> existing the Read activity to something else (ReadPDF ??) and then use
>> some kind of "wrapper activity" to launch the relevant activity as and
>> when required. Will this be useful/possible ?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Sayamindu
>
> Hi Sayamindu
>
> I don't have time to actively maintain Read at the moment. I've added
> "sayaminfu" (?) as a committer.
>

Thanks :-)

> FWIW I don't have a strong opinion on which approach to take - "show
> me the code"... as long as packaging the result for distros doesn't
> require non-upstream stuff.
>

Heh - I'll probably start by merging the bookmarking code into Read to
begin with :-)
Cheers,
Sayamindu

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