hi,
Adam R. Maxwell wrote:
On Feb 13, 2010, at 8:02 AM, thecolourblue wrote:
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.
Then why hasn't anyone forked Skim and added support for it?
[...]
well, I guess because of a shortage of time and expertise ;)
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).
Which arguably shouldn't have been added in the first place, especially since
it depends on non-system utilities :). If this is what you want, can you
convert these djvu files to PDF?
sure- in fact I may take this approach after this discussion. The reason
I am looking for Skim to display djvu in addition to pdf is that my djvu
documents converted to pdf would take up several times more space
(between 7 and 10 times in the tests I have done), and I have a lot of
them. This is a one-off cost and perfectly do-able, but the resulting
pdf's are very slow and inefficient to load because of their size-
opening Skim with a few >300MB files really slows my machine down ;) On
the other hand, reading the native djvu there is no such problem.
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?
GPL code cannot be included in Skim. LGPL libraries could be linked.
Ok, but Skim is bsd licensed, is it not? So one could distribute an
application with bsd Skim code and gpl djvu code?
There would be no need for extra functionality in the existing Skim code- no
interface changes for example.
People requesting a feature invariably claim that it's trivial, but aren't
willing to attempt it themselves. You don't have to ask permission to use
Skim's codebase; pull the source or con someone else into doing it, and start
hacking.
Sure, I'm not claiming its trivial- I appreciate the work that went into
Skim, and I'm not asking you to do the work on my behalf. If I get more
time I might look into the technical details a little more- otherwise
I'll just bite the bullet and ditch djvu in favour of pdf.
regards,
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