Stefan Kebekus wrote a note about what he and Wilfried Huss have been doing with the
kviewshell application.
During the last few months, the KViewShell application has been greatly renovated and improved. While KViewShell was originally designed as a multi-purpose document viewer, it was so far only used as a basis for KDVI. Following popular demand, Wilfried Huss and Stefan Kebekus have started to write KViewShell plugins for other document formats. The current SVN version of the kdegraphics package contains plugins for DVI and FAX files, and for the increasingly important DJVU format (www.djvuzone.org), which offers full-text search, extremely high performance and unbelievably good compression rates for scanned documents. Since DJVU is the format of choice for scanned documents and is used by more and more academic institutions and digitalization projects worldwide, we considered a decent DJVU-viewer a "must have" for KDE.
Current features for KViewShell include:
- various view modes, including continuous page view and facing page view
- thumbnail and bookmark support (bookmarks are fully supported by the current DVI plugin)
- a fullscreen-mode that is particularly useful for users with small displays
- full text search and copy-text-from-document functionality, currently supported by the DVI and DJVU plugins
- a good looking GUI that adapts on-the-fly to support the features of the file format of the document that is currently loaded
For the programmer, KViewShell has a well-documented plugin API with the FAX plugin as a reference documentation. At present, we are working on the performance of the DJVU plugin. Basic file editing functionality, similar to what Adobe Acrobat offers for PDF files, is already partially implemented in the DJVU plugin. An interface to OCR applications is also on our agenda.
We expect that kpdf, kghostview, KViewShell and the DVI, FAX, and DJVU plugins will eventually merge at some point in the future with a new document viewing application. This could be the programm oKular, which Piotr Szymanski is working on as a "Google Summer of Coding" project.