KPDF Interview - App of the Month
Interview with one of the authors of KPDF, Albert Astals Cid
You can also read the overview of KPDF.
Albert Astals Cid
Albert, you're the maintainer of KPDF, a rather new application in the KDE family. Please let us know who you are and how you started with the KPDF project.
I'm 23 and this is my last year in computer science studies i'm doing at FIB (UPC). I've been translating KDE to Catalan since summer 2002 and a bit later began developing too. My involvement in KPDF it started in summer 2004 when i began porting its core to use Xpdf 3.00 codebase instead of 2.x it was using. That gave rendering a boost in quality.
Who else should be mentioned when we speak about KPDF? What was their job within the project?
Wilco Greven and Christophe Devriese were the original KPDF developers we owe them from having started the project.
Enrico Ros took my KPDf codebase and recoded it almost from scratch based on the observer pattern and while doing that he created wrapper classes around Xpdf classes that will probably improve the chances of supporting other formats in the future. He also added quite nice features like the continous view.
Jakub Stachowski also has contributed some feature patches recently like the one that uses fontconfig to search for external fonts instead the "crappy" Xpdf code.
The PDF format itself is a wide-spread, but closed source document format. In the open source world, there were many efforts into "reverse engineering projects" in order to bring PDF to the UNIX world. Somehow, there are still some problems with PDF under UNIX-like systems, e.g. the document size of Adobe Acrobat files are much smaller than the ones generated with ghostscript. What can be done in your opinion to improve PDF writing under UNIX in future?
Well, i'm not sure what you mean with closed source format, but http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/pdf/PDFReference16.pdf has the PDF 1.6 specification a 1236 page PDF that describes in depth the PDF format. So it's not an open source format in the form that Adobe is the only one that decides what features to implement, but is not as closed as to need reverse engineering to write a PDF creator/viewer application.
We have several PDF viewers available for Linux, e.g. Adobe Acrobat Reader, Xpdf or KGhostview. Why do we need another PDF application?
Well Acrobat reader is not Free software so it is out of the question for some people, Xpdf is good at rendering but has such bad user interface that most people don't like it, KGhostview in the other hand as a pretty good UI but Xpdf is mostly superior in rendering, so KPDF fills the gap, as a good UI and the good Xpdf rendering.
KDE 3.4. is just out. What new features can we get from the current and upcoming releases of KPDF?
Well, KPDF 0.4 (the one that comes with 3.4) has a pretty good bag of new features: search, continous view, copying text and images, using kttsd to speak text, ... but as this comment says "KDE 3.4? Old-fashioned already ;-)" for now we have a fonts dialogue, using KWallet for storing password of password-protected document and Enrico is working on a way of doing annotations on the document.
KPDF is a pdf viewer only. Do you have plans to add a feature to write the PDF format with KPDF? Would this make sense in your eyes?
Well, writing to PDF is not easy, some people have requested us to add writing functionality, but IMHO adding it would be getting KPDF out of scope.
Politicians, economists and software developers are heatedly discussing the subject of software patents in Europe. What is your point of view here? How would you personally be affected by software patents?
Well, software patents are bad for every developer out there, big corporations have less problems because they don't fight between them because they usually have patents that are infriged but they also infringe others' patents. Once I made a comparison to nuclear weapons, big countries have them to feel safe against other big countrys that have also nuclear weapons and to scare small ones. Now we see countrys signing treaties to not develop more nuclear weapons, i hope software patents follow the same path and instead of being more and more accepted they begin to be seen as a bad thing.
Albert, you live in Barcelona, Spain. What role does open source software play in your country? What's the position of your government towards OSS?
What role it depends who you speak to, there's lots of people that don't know anything about OSS but others say it's the future even when some don't use it. About the government is pretty strange, most autonomous communities (regions) have their own linux distribution thay try to use in their offices but country government says it wants to stay neutral, which in my opinion in the end means that they go to closed source because it's what they already have.
This year's KDE summit will take place in your home country, in Malaga, Spain. Will you attend the meeting?
I hope to do it, but it will depend on the dates.
And had you already the chance to meet some fellow KDE developers in real life?
In wanted to go to last Akademy but i could not so i don't know any KDE developer.
Maybe you can give the KDE summit attendees some hints on which other places to visit while staying in Spain? :-)
Andalusia (the region where Malaga is located) has lots of splendid monuments and buildings thanks to the Muslim era. I've not been to Malaga itself but "nearby" capitals like Seville, Corboda and Granada have lots and lots of monuments to see. Between the three, Granada and the Alhambra (a World Heritage Site) are my favorites.
KDE is short for "K Desktop Environment". Do you have some other funny fancy name we could use for KDE instead? :-)
Nah, i'm not a specially funny guy so for me KDE is only KDE.
Which UNIX/Linux distribution do you use for your work and why?
I usually use Mandrake Linux in its latest stable version (10.1 now), it's really the only Linux distribution i have ever used and as it works reasonably well for me so i see no reason to change.
Let us know a bit more about you. Do you have family? Pets? How much time do you spend working on KDE?
I'm not married and don't have a girlfriend at the moment but i hope that'll change sooner or later :-D So I live with my parents. I don't have any pet but some toys on the top of my monitor (I can count 4 now) they are animals too and don't get dirty :-D
About work on KDE it really depends on how the other things on my life are going but an hour daily would be a good estimation.
You can also read the overview of KPDF.
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