On 28.01.2012 13:46, Richard Stallman wrote:
Well from my understanding its all about poppler, the library behind evince, okular, xpdf et cetera. And from what I remember when talking with some of the devs is that it might never reach compliance with ISO 32000 (PDF 1.7).
That is surprising. We might learn more about the best way to handle this if we understood why they think so. I'd expect them to be strongly motivated to push from 99% to 100%.
Maybe there is some special obstacle that is very hard to handle. Could you ask them for details?
We could approach them again. IIRC it was something about the interactive features of PDF (forms, animations, conditional content), and poppler being designed to display things only, not to interact.
I am not sure whether poppler supports any of the older versions completely, and since they are not very common, I would rather advertise 90% compliance with PDF 1.7 than 99% compliance with PDF 1.2.
I won't argue against that.
> 1. A page that says "Here's how to inwtall a free PDF reader." This > is what people should link to when they link to a PDF file. I think > that should be the main page of the pdfreaders.org site. Thats the way it is right now, see http://pdfreaders.org
If that's the purpose of this page, the first paragraph should be replaced. This page should not discuss versions of PDF. It should not say what is good or bad about PDF (in particular, no need to call it an "open standard". For a person who wants to install a PDF player, that is a confusing distracton
Just say, "If you want to read a PDF file, you don't have to install Adobe's proprietary software that doesn't give you freedom. Here's how to install a free program to read that PDF file."
Well, we wanted to use the main page to at least offer a little bit of education (with further links), since that's the one most people will read.
The information in the first paragraph belongs in http://fsfe.org/campaigns/pdfreaders/pdfreaders.en.html. It is relevant there. In pdfreaders.org it only adds unnecessary complexity, which in this page we really want to avoid.
Offering a long list of PDF readers is also unnecessary complexity. I suggest you make the simplest recommendations you can. Recommend just one player for each platform. Make it simple to do what we ask people to do.
The full list could come after, as a sort of appendix.
This is exactly what we had in mind for bigger changes in the mid-term: recommend only one reader on the main page, and show the complete list on a different page. This requires some more fundamental work, as we also want to include readers for mobile platforms and browser plugins.
If I understand MK correctly, you were kind of urgent about the smaller issues (wording on the main page et cetera), to get your campaign going. That's why I postponed the bigger changes to later on. [I estimate it will be at least two months, maybe three before we could get a major overhaul done, because there is mostly volunteers working on it, translations need to be done a.s.o] Minor changes could be done more quickly...
But if you are not in a rush about the changes, we might as well do the entire re-design in one go.