Notices

Hello,

I'd like to announce modern computer flatboat which is a mobile pdf viewer written in Qt and using MuPDF's libfitz.
Some of flatboat's features are (for other features see the help page and the gitorious page):

• a column mode
• an in-document history
• writing support for ink annotations and text annotations

The column mode, is designed for (multicolumn) PDFs with tiny font and few images. By joining horizontally overlapping text regions it tries to detect columns.

Everytime you "jump" (e.g. follow a link, go to the last/first page) within the document, the page you come frome is stored. This in-document history is accessible via I, to jump back to the most recent page simply press Backspace.

One of the activities easy to perform with a touchscreen is drawing. That’s why I implemented reading and writing support for ink annotations first. Since version 0.8 flatboat also supports Text annotations, i.e. those with an icon, which pop up, if you click on them. FreeText annotations (text visible without user interaction) will probably follow with one of the next releases.

You can install it on N900 via extras-devel (see the homepage while garage is in read only mode), whereas you will find the source code and builds for Harmattan, Android, Ubuntu, OS X and Windows on its homepage.

Since it's statically linked against libfitz (the library of mupdf) and some of mupdf's thirdparty libraries, the binary is bigger than it has to be. Maybe I'll try to convert some of the libraries to shared objects later on.

If you like to use it with dbus-switchboard to make it your standard pdf viewer:

• add "flatboat" with "flatboat %realparams%" to Handlers
• set the X-ref ".pdf" to "flatboat"
• set the Default "application/pdf" to "hildon-dbus-switchboard.desktop"

PS: The name is a (stupid) anagram of "portable document format".

PPS: m.c. flatboat does not write a so called appearance stream with each annotation, some readers do need those (see the help page).

Thank you! I use mupdf at PC, a great and simple pdf viewer. Could you attach it here? I can't connect to dropbox for some reason

@frafI
Thanks, i installed your app and it is fine for now

@laolang_cool
the file could not be attached here ( it is 3 MB )
try this on your N900
then you should find the deb on your N900 ( in MyDocs )

./sifo

As sifo already said, it's way too large. If it really doesn't work I can upload it elsewhere (suggestion?).

I have to mention, that flatboat doesn't behave like mupdf, it just inherited its rendering engine (which seems to be faster than poppler). But I will upload the original mupdf to extras-devel, too, since it's source package generates "libmupdf-dev", which is required by my package.

I try to build jbig2dec (dependency of mupdf) using autobuilder via the web interface. The changes file contains the orig.tar.gz, however the web interface doesn't ask me to upload it. Any ideas?
Edit: Seems to work using dput.

I'm trying mupdf on n900, keys don't work at all, I have to use touch screen to do all operations on pdf

I had the same experience, but I did not exclude the mupdf binary from the control file, because someone might find it useful anyway.
Because the mupdf developpers wanted to keep it small and portable (I guess) they didn't use any major toolkit, so modifying/patching the GUI is not a very pleasant job. That's why I wrote my own frontend using qt.

Flatboat now supports previous/next page (or scroll down/next column in column mode) via right/down/volume-, but I'll add keys for zoom and rotation.

I think I got it, thank you for your work!

Version 0.6 is in extras-devel now (and the links in Post1 are updated), which adds key shortcuts for most of the functions (for other changes, see changelog).

Excelent work; Thanks a lot.

Regards.