I am not a document viewer expert, though the Zaurus based Plucker viewer is pretty good (in the sense of nearly implementing the complete spec) now but I have some comments for your consideration.
The main problem I had with translating the spec onto the Zaurus were that a number of "sizes" were in pixels. No problem for images but it was a bit of pain for things like indents when I zoomed in/out. The other main places that I recall that pixel sizes are used is in paragraph spacing (which I don't really use on the Zaurus yet) and in horizontal rule size. Similarly, it was difficult selecting the right sized fonts to use for each type because older documents seemed to have been formatted to take advantage of the specific palm fonts which corresponded to each font type rather than the intent of the spec - so not a problem with the spec, really, except that the representation of fonts encouraged this. I can see that nobody would want to change the file format but if the spec made these sizes relative, eg, to the current font size then you can do more meaningful translations to other devices where pixels could be ludcrously small (or big). If there were to be a Plucker mark 2 (and I'm not suggesting this as it would create an incompatible format) then the pixel sizing and font selection could do with being a little less "palm-centric". For example, on the Z I use bold, italic etc flags to indicate the style of the font and an offset (which can be negative) into a size hierarchy to specify the size of the font (eg, one size bigger than base font). This would be too Z centric but something even more general would be better. A current problem I have is figuring out how to get the URLs of the external links out. There is a slight mismatch in terminology in the version of the document I have where the descriptive text refers to URLs but the spec for the paragraph types refers to links when referring to the record types - or maybe these are different and that is why I haven't yet managed to get it working 8^). BTW, for those interested, the Zaurus/Opie viewer is now only missing the above mentioned external URLs, owner id encoding, fixed width font, full justification and the unicode characters (ironic since unicode handling is already builtin - but the all the other document decoders are pure 8-bit so the unicode stuff comes too late in the chain). There are still a couple of formatting glitches but everyone who hasn't used the palm reader before is pretty pleased with the results (darn that excellent Palm based reader 8^) ). Get the "bugfix" version from http://www.timwentford.uklinux.net/ (or http://www.timwentford.uklinux.net/opie-reader_0_5h_arm.ipk if you want to get the current version direct). Actually, that brings me to another question, to get the formatting right I had to strip off some spaces from between the place where the paragraph index indicated that there should be a new paragraph and the first non-space character. This seems to be what the explode/konqueror combination does, too, but if I do that, won't I lose the "Indent first line of every paragraph" effect from the distiller - or that accomplished in a different way? (eg, If the distiller set the indent before the first character of the paragraph and then immediately set it back after the first character it would work on my reader - but I want to match what the distiller currently does). Cheers Tim _______________________________________________ plucker-dev mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.rubberchicken.org/mailman/listinfo/plucker-dev
