Evince PostScript backend

Yesterday at 10:00pm I decided that it was about time to start working on a project that I am supposed to finish by April 13th. The project consists of finding a way to implement text search and selection in a PostScript document viewer. I then checked out Evince from the gnome svn tree, and started checking its code,  in order to try to implement those features in my favorite document viewer.

First I tried to make the current PostScript backend prepend a text extraction prologue to all PostScript documents it open, to override the /show /kshow …. operators, and make them spit out some informations about the position of the glyphs and their value. The idea seemed okay, but in fact it was quite heavy, and overblown… I had to think about something simpler, and still powerful.

The idea of using ghostscript pdfwrite output device to generate a pdf stream out of a PS file and send it directly to poppler for the rendering came then to my mind. The nice part about it, is that we can inherit all the nice and cool features of the PDF implementation in Evince.

I started hacking yesterday at around 11:30, and today at 15:00 I had a fully functionnal PostScript backend implementation that can let you select text, copy it, search for text and display pages thumbnails

During this short project, I felt in love with Evince architecture. Evince is for sure a very well designed software.