I share Manuel's view about delegating some functionality to external apps, like a PDF reader, the web browser or even Pandoc. There is a lot of external mature stuff out there and we can gain users from there if we make bridges to the stuff they already know and use. For example, I would like to try the Pharo-Chrome integration and also the Hypothesis JSON API to annotate and read PDF/HTML.
Cheers, Offray On 02/11/17 13:49, Manuel Leuenberger wrote: > 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 >> <mailto: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 >> Also slides from the SCG seminar >> here: >> 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 >> >
