MuPdf / Fitz

[Raph Levien]

Hi Tor,

   I took MuPdf for a brief spin, and I am impressed! The text and
image rendering is very pretty, and it _feels_ responsive.

   I did notice that the qt version chews up a ton of memory on the X
server. Without looking at the code, I'd guess that it's allocating
and not releasing pixmaps. Obviously, using GdkRgb (as the Ksvg people
are doing) would fix this.

   Another minor nit is that the screen is cleared with dark gray
before every page. That increases the "flashing" effect when paging
very rapidly. Clearing with a lighter color, or not at all, would be
a win.

   You mention CCITT fax decoding. Ghostscript has a decoder, and
you're obviously welcome to use the version in the GPL release (it
hasn't been updated recently). It's in src/scfd.c. However, you may
well find the code frightening; it's goto-laced, uses a lot of macros,
and uses Ghostscript's somewhat odd runtime conventions. We're
actually doing a separate CCITT G4 decoder in jbig2dec, but it's not
finished yet. See:

http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/jbig2dec/jbig2dec/jbig2_mmr.c

   There's a lot of stuff that you're not implementing. As I wrote
in my diary, I _am_ interested in that stuff. I'm wondering to what
extent you're interested in pooling resources and working on Fitz.
Antony has posted some goals here:

   http://www.haskell.org/fitz/arch/arch.html

   My main issue with Fitz right now is that I'm quite busy with the
8.0 release. So, if your goal is to get stuff done quickly, I might
be a slow-down. I guess the big question is how great the impedance
mismatch is between your goals and mine.

   We can continue chatting via email, or by phone. My number is +1
707 746 6398, and I have a very inexpensive phone card for calling
out.

Kudos,

Raph