A few questions on your future plans

[John Layt]

Hi,

Firstly, kudos for releasing this, and especially for releasing as BSD, the GPL licence of the other FOSS solutions has caused everyone problems.  I appreciate it's early days, but the lack of detail in the announcements and the lack of documentation leaves me with rather a lot of questions.  I'll start with just a couple of keys ones for now.

1) What is the intention for the library project, is it solely to provide a PDF renderer for Chrome, or do you intend it to be a full-featured PDF rendering, creation and editing library used by other projects as well, perhaps taking the place of Poppler?

2) What is the supported feature set? The project page links to the docs for v2.0 of the Foxit SDK, but statements elsewhere suggest that PDFium does not implement the full feature set of the Foxit SDK?  Or, seeing as Foxit are at v4.0 of their SDK, do we have the full set of v2.0 features, with the features added in 3.0 and 4.0 not included?  I'm particularly interested in the PDF creation and editing, and headless printing of PDFs on Windows.

3) For those features that are missing from PDFium, will they be added in the future, or will Foxit's commercial interests prevent that?  What exactly is the relationship between PDFium and Foxit's SDK in the future?  Completely separate projects or a common shared code base?

4) Will there be any binary or source compatibility guarantees for the library, or will they change with every Chrome release? This will be important if PDFium is to be widely adopted on Linux and FOSS.

5) It appears on Linux that the only rendering option is to bitmap, which would be sub-optimal, is the code base structured so that other Linux toolkits can implement support for rendering direct to their graphics contexts, e.g. Qt or Cairo?

Thanks!

John.

[kai_jing]

Hi John, I will try to answer your questions shortly.  

Kai

[kai_jing]

Hi John,

   Here is my answer from my personal understanding:

#1 answer:  PDFium is a PDF rendering engine used by Chrome. It is requested to be open source. Right now, there is no plan to make it a full-featured PDF. Foxit commercial SDK have full-features. 

#2 answer: Since no much documents about PDFium. Someone just post the docs for v2.0 of the Foxit SDK that is closed to PDFium. However Foxit SDK 4.0 (latest/greatest version) have full features, that include PDF creation and editing. More info can be found at http://www.foxitsoftware.com/products/sdk/PDFsdk/feature.php. 

#3 answer: currently, no any plan to add those features into PDFium. If you are interested in each roadmap, please contact Foxit or leave contact information, someone can show you.

#4 answer: will match Chrome release schedule, however we lovely to hear any suggestion from open source community.

#5, answer: we need some experts from open source community who know how to do it with Qt or Cairo. This is just a start point of open source PDFium. we need open source community to work together to make it more powerful.

best regards,

[John Abd-El-Malek]

I'll add a few addendums :)

If third party devs want to add any features to PDFium, we would be happy to accept patches. Google engineers will concentrate on adding features that we need for our products.

Regarding documentation, we do need better resources. Kai: are the documentation in the headers all up to date? I noticed that some files in fpdfsdk don't have comments. If we can ensure that they're all documented, that should be the official documentation and we can stop linking to the 2.0 docs. I've personally seen mismatches that have bit me.

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