Christiaan Hofman wrote:
On Feb 12, 2010, at 12:06, thecolourblue wrote:
Hi,
I know the issue of using Skim for reading djvu files has been
brought up several times here (and always rejected)- I thought I
would try again ;)
Why, if you know the answer?
Christiaan
Hi,
Did you read the rest of my email?
The issue has been brought up several times before, so there is clearly
an expressed demand for it, and given the poor state of djvu readers on
the mac, I suspect a large amount of unexpressed support. I think the
reasons for rejecting the idea out of hand are not well justified, which
is why I brought it up again.
The given reasons on the archive for dismissing it are that djvu support
is out of the scope for Skim, and technical reasons to with Skim using
apple's PDFKit for display. In terms of scope, I think displaying djvu
is clearly within the scope of the Skim program (at least for me, and
others who have requested the feature). For some kinds of scanned
documents (but not only that), djvu is considered a better format than
pdf (significantly better quality at greater compression ratios). For
these documents where both pdf's and djvu's are commonly used it makes
sense to have one program to read them (and I think is currently the
best reader)- the functions one needs are exactly the same, display,
zoom, print, skip to page etc. This is nothing like asking Skim to
support lots of different file types like office .docx documents or
photoshop .psd's- but more like its existing support for dvi files
(which it simply converts to pdf).
The technical arguments are more of an issue since Skim gets its pdf
support for free from PDFKit, and no such support is currently available
for djvu files. However, there are gpl libraries available for reading
and displaying djvu files and if they could be coaxed into a framework
which provided something like the functionality of PDFKit, then surely
including support in Skim would be a very simple job? There would be no
need for extra functionality in the existing Skim code- no interface
changes for example.
Of course, there is no suggestion that you personally should do this
work. I would appreciate your advice, given your intimate knowledge of
Skim, on how it could be done, and ask if anyone else is prepared to help?
regards,
tcb
The justification is simple- I have lots of pdf's which I enjoy
reading and annotating with Skim- I also have lots of djvu's which I
would like to read with Skim also. The djvu's are mostly scanned
documents, for which djvu seems to do a much better job at
representing than pdf's (I could convert them to pdf's but it would
take a *long* time, and increase my disk space by a factor of about
7). The readers for djvu's on the mac are poor, but Skim is
excellent, and it would be great if it would display djvu's too.
The technical arguments are that Skim uses apple's PDFKit to render
the pdf's and there is no support for djvu. But the djvu libraries
are freely available- if they could be massaged to provide a DJVUKit
which would read and display djvu's then could such functionality be
easily integrated into Skim? Of course, some things might not work (I
dont know about notes or searching), but if Skim could just display
my djvu's like a pdf, then I would be v. happy.
Any thoughts?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SOLARIS 10 is the OS for Data Centers - provides features such as DTrace,
Predictive Self Healing and Award Winning ZFS. Get Solaris 10 NOW
http://p.sf.net/sfu/solaris-dev2dev
_______________________________________________
Skim-app-users mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/skim-app-users
