Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Poppler 0.7.1 (0.8 Beta 2) released

Available from
http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.7.1.tar.gz

This is the second release of what will be the 0.8 stable series. We will be having a roughly weekly release schedule until we hit 0.8 stable version. Target is March 19 for 0.8.0

Major Changes:
* Really distribute CMake files as optional build tool
* Initial Optional Content support in core and in the Qt4 frontend

Minor Changes:
* Allow grouped checkboxes to be selected individually
* Qt4 demo program improvements
* Keep cairo and cairo_shape consistent
* Safety checks on Splash renderer so that it does not draw outside the
allocated bitmap
* Do not try to display bitmaps of invalid size
* Fix building with exceptions
* Improvements for building with MSVC and CMake

Testing, patches and bug reports welcome.

Saturday, February 23, 2008

PostScript is turing complete

Yes, PostScript is turing complete so next time you get a different output when printing with kpdf than the one you get when doing print preview in kpdf, specially if the print preview looks correct, blame whoever decided to use such a complex language for printers and also the drivers of your printer for not being able to understand it, do not blame kpdf.

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Poppler 0.7.0 (0.8 Beta 1) released

Available from
http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.7.0.tar.gz

This is the first release of what will be the 0.8 stable series. We will be having a roughly weekly release schedule until we hit 0.8 stable version.

Besides lots of small improvements/bugfixes, the big things of this release are:
* Saving support
* Partial annotation support
* Forms improvements
* Add support for ActualText entries
* Display characters outside of unicode BMP with TT font
* CJK rendering fixes
* Implement Adobe Glyph Naming convention for fonts
* CMake as optional build tool
* Better font scaling for non embedded fonts
* Preserve PDF page labels when we output as postscript

I've created a tag for 0.7.0 but not a branch. We will keep developing on master for the short 0.7 series, so please, only commit bugfixes, frontend improvements and "preapproved core changes" like saving/forms/optionalContent changes.

Testing, patches and bug reports welcome.

Saturday, February 02, 2008

Okular and libspectre

Since KDE 4.0 okular has been using libspectre to render PS files. Due to libspectre being too new we decided to package it inside okular sources in the KDE 4.0.x tree. That has been corrected in trunk because everyone knows having other libraries inside your own source tree sucks, so for now on you need libspectre to get PS support on okular. The downside of that is that i could only find Debian and Pardus libspectre packages, so go to your distro and file a bug and tell them to package libspectre.

Intel publishes graphic cards specs

So now, besides paying people to work on drivers, specs are available to everyone else, cool!