My first month on GSoC

This first month of GSoC was a great learning experience for me, when speaking to my colleagues of how Summer of Code is being important to my professional life, I always respond that I’m finally learning to code and the basic of C++.

Yes, maybe this is strange, I’m a second year undergraduate Computer Science student, have two year experience with C++. I should have learn to code by now right? Well, at least on my Campus you don’t learn to code applications or how to build stable, clean code. You learn to solve problems, and that’s something I got pretty good at, but when it came to code, well, I’m learning that now and I’m liking it a lot.

Let’s walk through what I implemented the last month on the Okular side. It’s been a while since Adobe implemented support for JavaScript in their PDF, unfortunately the support for this JavaScript is pretty limited in most readers which aren’t Adobe Reader. I’ll skip the technical details, these can be found at my status report page on https://community.kde.org/GSoC/2019/StatusReports/Jo%C3%A3oNetto.

Before my patches were applied in Poppler and Okular, we only could see a gray rectangle above any animations or buttons. These animations could not be played, and it would only stay still when opened.

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Now, Okular can display all the animations produced by the Beamer and Animate package, which are LaTeX packages. Also, it’s the first time these are supported on a Linux Platform.

And this was what I’ve done in the first month. Seems like not a lot of things, but I learned a lot, and I think this has been the most valuable thing to me.