VPDF bounty is now open

VPDF is a fast and efficient PDF viewer released for MorphOS 3.0, however since then it has been released as an opensource project.

Kas1e (Roman Kargin) propose the bounty and he would be the mantainer of an eventual AmigaOS4 version.

If you like the project and/or if you think it worth give something for it, fell free to donate what you can on the usual place:

http://www.amigabounty.net/?function=viewproject&projectid=101

The bounty page says "It is faster than APFD". Now I just have a question: What the hell is APFD . Did he mean AmiPDF?

I'm a regular bounty supporter and I do believe in crowd-sourcing as the way to finance the development of AmigaOS and its software. However, I have a question for the AmigaBounty team: how on earth can you ever give the green light to a project like this? Yes VPDF would be nice but how can you start asking for money for a project that has no description, no milestones, no deadline? Opening half-cooked projects really devalues bounty financing and makes AmigaBounty.net look unprofessional.

@Trixie

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Synopsis:
VPDF is a fast and efficient PDF viewer done for morphos 3.0 and since then released as opensource. It is faster than APDF and have better comatibility with PDF format in general.
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Nothing more to add imho.

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Deadlines in amiga projects ?:) Are you sure that it make any sense to set some, just to broken it later with any kind of excuse ? If so: end of 2012.

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There is also some other things which make amigabounty looks unproffesional: like need to remove from suggested list some bountyes as they already done, or like those ones which make no sense, or like make something about Gnash and still transfer money to afxgroup, even if there is no ready plugin to use, as we all know that there is no browsers with normall support of npapi enabled.

You know for sure that amigabounty owners have no interest to handle all of this, they have no money, they even pay it from their own for hosting and stuff, so we can't blame them that they lazy there, or slow there, or "looks unproffesional" here. If someone will spend few tens of thousands to them, then they for sure will looks like proffesionals :) (as all the other amiga related stuff).

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Probably he is referring to APDF. AmiPDF is the PDF viewer that is included with AmigaOS 4.x.

@salas00
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Initially i mean only AmiPDF which included to the OS, but in general that not so mater, as any amigaos4 pdf viewer slower, older and have less functional (as from gui point of view, and the same as from pdf-support point of view) in compare with VPDF (tested and retested myself on peg2)

@Kas1

any news about new version of MuiOWB ???

@sofisisoftware
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I send mail to Troels with asking about making and assign 2 more bountyes on me:

One about new version of muiowb (all the money will be split beetwen fab , thore, me and deniil). And another one about book about which i talk some months ago (money from which will be also splitted with anyone who help me before o will help with it). I send mail 2 days ago, but have no answer for now.

We think about making such a bounty (for muiowb), even 3-4 months ago, but as i have a lot of RL stuff to do, it was put on hold.

Thats all news currently.

@kas1e

Well AmiPDF 1.25 is based on XPDF 3.02, since then only some fix was added (in XPDF) so i don't think it will be so old or incompatible .. still speed can be questionable, i don't know how fast is VPDF compared to ...

Any new good program will worth aniway

@kas1e

About Odyssey: Excellent news

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Just get some heavy PDF file and check it with AmiPDF and VPDF, you will see the difference. Only that is enough (even if it only about speed). But there is also different gui , which some can find better in compare with amipdf.

@kas1e

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Roman, this is VPDF description, not a project synopsis! I know what the program does - but I'd like to know more about what you're planning to do as part of the project. Do we get a "straight" port from MorphOS, or are you planning any OS4-specific features? The choice of GUI toolkit springs to mind as the very first thing. While MUI is generally OK with me, I do prefer (and donate more money to) projects that provide OS4's standard GUI.

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Yes, I'm absolutely serious about deadlines and milestones. They are key information in any kind of project. How can I tell that a project is realistic (and thus worth supporting) if there's no timeframe at all?

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No, I'm simply blaming them for accepting and opening a bounty for a project that lacks the necessary information.
No matter how busy/penniless/tired/whatever they are, they should have told you to submit a proper project.

How is the speed? 10% faster (not worth it IMHO), or 100% faster (definitely worth it) when loading big complex PDFs? And does it pre-cache the next/previous page (would help with speed)?

And what about printing? It's there a direct turboprint support? It's possible to export pages as bitmap images?
I think that a feature list is highly needed, or al least
a link to a page with detailed description.

I did it, because we need a fast PDF reader the currents are very slow even with a machine of 1GHZ.

VPDF is a lot faster actually. I tried to open the Titan Quest manual in pdf a few days back and opened it in half the time AmiPDF did and stepped forward to the next page a lot quicker as well. For me it's a project worth donating if only I wasn't in such a bad financial shape....

@Trixie
Point taken.
Details for this bounty was very vague and will be updated ASAP.

Best Regards
Troels

@Troels

Thank you!

I think AmiPDF is good enough. It has a good GUI with content table on the side, search functionality, copy text etc. What else do you need? Only thing I can think of is continuous page scrolling instead of this jumping between pages. Does VPDF support that?

I think time and money can be better spent.

@Deniil:

There are two bad problems with APDF that have never been addressed:
1. It crashes and burns when you try to expand the page more than one or two times. It should be rewritten to require no more memory than for the previous zoom level.
2. It is hellishly slow at showing documents that I can display much faster on a 200 MHz PC laptop using Acrobat. The speed needs to be increased tenfold, not doubled.

Unless VPDF can fix these problems (as well as use the native GUI, not MUI), there seems little point in spending time or money on it.