[Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] Browse PDF handling

[Manuel Quiñones]

Hi S Page,

El día 3 de febrero de 2012 03:00, S Page <skierpage at gmail.com> escribió:
> 2012/2/2 Manuel Quiñones <manuq at laptop.org>:
>
>> Am I overlooking something?  Comments?
>
> Sounds good. But Browse already works similar to this on an XO-1
> running 11.3.0. E.g. open a PDF Collection from the  "OLPC Library"
> home page such as Big Cats or Activity Handbook, and it opens in
> Browse in the current Browse window (not a new tab) and isn't added to
> the Journal. Is your innovation the Save to Journal?

That's true for the Browse activity shipped in olpc builds, which is
being patched to do the PDF embed, see [1].  We are trying to get rid
of that and do this in Browse mainline.

[1] https://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/103

>  It seems the
> same capability might be useful for other content types you see in the
> browser, like video and audio.

Interesting.  Maybe for a second round?  The main issue we are trying
to tackle is the one described above.

> One thing I regret is that Read is more usable than Browse in e-book
> mode.  The game keys don't work the same in Browse, you have to be
> careful to focus the Browse window in order to use the arrow keys,
> there's less real estate for content. Somehow I've gotten PDFs to show
> in the Journal, and from there I Resume with > Read for a better
> reading experience.

Yes, there are bugs for that too, [2][3][4][5].  We are going to get
rid of those with the new code, basically the source of those bugs was
the embed done using xembed (anyone experienced Flash focus problems
in a browser?  Is the same).

The new basic PDF navigation in Browse should use the same key bindings as Read.

[2] http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/10514
[3] http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/11306
[4] http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/2935
[5] https://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/2934

> Years ago there was mailing list discussion about how opening a URL in
> Browse could hand it off to an activity that supports its mime type;
> as I recall there were Rainbow security issues. Maybe your explicit
> Save to Journal that implicitly saves the data to the XO's storage is
> a better approach. In general Sugar has a hard time making useful &
> intelligible distinctions between open & bookmark in Browse versus
> open & manage in Journal, but that's true of every desktop I've yet
> seen, all uneasily dealing with the web. IMO the problem goes away
> best when you run *everything* in the browser ;-)

I think the approach I'm considering fits Sugar very well.  Thanks for
your comments.

Cheers,

-- 
.. manuq ..