Hi,

I'm new here and I'm very glad to join the community! I work for a research center and we would like to test some of our research on open source viewers. Okular is my first choice. As eventually I'll need to change some UI, get content of documents from backend, apply our algorithm and get some output, I need to first understand the source code of Okular a little bit. This is my first experience of developing with open source software and I'm now having some trouble with understanding the source code. Is there any kind of developer's manual so that I could understand the source code quickly and be able to integrate my own functionality into it? Any suggestion is welcome!

Welcome to KDE Development.

Okular is written using C++ with the Qt toolkit, as most KDE applications are, so you will need to be familiar with the conventions of both. KDE has also extended Qt in several areas, so if you encounter these extensions I suggest you refer to the API documentation on api.kde.org, as well as tutorials on KDE Techbase (techbase.kde.org). If you are not familiar with Qt, I would suggest a quick tour of the tutorials which are included in the Qt documentation first.

What sort of modifications are you looking at making?

Thanks for your suggestions. I'll check those documents out later.

What I want to do is to test a search algorithm on images. Specifically, I want to add a search box to the UI and when you click on the search button I will first get all the images from a pdf document and do some analysis of the images and finally present the search result to user. The search result may need a separate view.

Currently I have only tried to build the project in command line. Is there way to put the whole project into an IDE like eclipse which is much more convenient for development?

For KDE development I can totally unselfishly suggest using KDevelop as an IDE. From my experience it makes it much easier to work with an unknown codebase.

Also, functionality as you suggested should probably be implemented as a plugin, so you should look at writing a plugin for Okular.

It's a good idea to stay in contact with the application's developers via their IRC channel and mailing list, too.

Greetings

Hi scummos,

I just installed KDevelop. When I select Project->Open/Import Project, I found that I can only import *.kdev4. Is there a easy way to turn the source code into a project that KDevelop can open?

scummos wrote:For KDE development I can totally unselfishly suggest using KDevelop as an IDE. From my experience it makes it much easier to work with an unknown codebase.

Also, functionality as you suggested should probably be implemented as a plugin, so you should look at writing a plugin for Okular.

It's a good idea to stay in contact with the application's developers via their IRC channel and mailing list, too.

Greetings

You can select any folder and click open.
Preferably, select the project's CMakeLists.txt file, to tell KDevelop to use the CMake project manager.

Cheers,
Sven