Hi Dimitris, I looked around for a way to integrate PDF into Pharo. But as long as we don’t have a way to natively display interactive multimedia (maybe Bloc will at some point support something like this?), I consider it not worth the effort to come up with a half-baked (note to self: watch that movie again) solution that is hard to implement and cannot even remotely support all the use cases as an external tool that have been crafted for years. Just rendering bitmaps loses so much information (full text) and actionability (hyperlinks). If I wanted to have interactive PDFs inside Pharo, I had to invest so much time to replicate functionality that has been implemented before. So, I chose the path of the least resistance by pushing this responsibility to a specialized tool. I think Pharo is great for modelling, exploration, and inspection, but OS integration is not really a selling point, and it doesn’t have to be. By using a standard PDF viewer I also gain that users are already familiar with them and have their own workflow that I can extend.
As a side note, I think that being able to embed a web browser inside Pharo would open up a whole new world of applications, as web browsers are currently the vehicles for content distribution. But as long as there is no project where this is a critical feature, I can live without it. Cheers, Manuel > On 1 Nov 2017, at 22:39, Dimitris Chloupis <kilon.al...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Super cool more detailed recommendations when I try it on practice > > A cheap pdf viewer in Pharo would be to turn pdf pages to JPG images which > you can load via image morph so you won’t have to have two separate windows. > There are ton of converters out there that can do this. > On Wed, 1 Nov 2017 at 23:17, Manuel Leuenberger <leuenber...@inf.unibe.ch > <mailto:leuenber...@inf.unibe.ch>> wrote: > Hi everyone, > > I was experimenting in the last few weeks with my take on literature > research. For me, the corpus of scientific papers form an interconnected > graph, not those plain lists and tables we keep in our bibliographies. So, > here is the first prototype that has Google Scholar integration for search, > can fetch PDFs from IEEE and ACM, extracts metadata from PDFs - all this > results in hyperlinked PDFs! > > See a demo here: https://youtu.be/EcK3Pt_WnEw <https://youtu.be/EcK3Pt_WnEw> > Also slides from the SCG seminar here: > http://scg.unibe.ch/download/softwarecomposition/2017-10-31-Leuenberger-ILE.pdf > > <http://scg.unibe.ch/download/softwarecomposition/2017-10-31-Leuenberger-ILE.pdf> > > I plan on packaging it, so that those who are interested can check it out > themselves (help wanted!). Currently, it only works on macOS. > > What do you think of my approach? Which use cases should be added? > > Cheers, > Manuel >
