As has been discussed on this forum, a rewrite of Xournal in C++ called Xournal++ was underway a couple of years ago. Denis (the main Xournal author and maintainer) said back in May 2011 that he wasn't likely to accept many more patches for Xournal because "Andreas' work on Xournal++ will be ready for public release fairly soon".
Alas, at this point there's only been 1 (trivial) commit to Xournal++ in the last 15 months, so it looks as if that project is either stalled or dead. Yesterday I tried to build Xournal++ to see where it stands. (It took me a minute to realize that git holds the Xournal code, and the Xournal++ code is in the svn repository.) There are a couple of challenges to building. First, Xournal++ won't build with a current build of Poppler (I have 0.20.5 in Ubuntu 13.10, which is not even as new as the latest 0.22.2 release). It apparently uses internal Poppler APIs which have changed to use different numbers of arguments. Also, it expects an internal Poppler header file called CairoOutputDev.h to be installed on the user's system. Ubuntu used to distribute that header in the libpoppler-dev package back in Precise (12.04), but it's not present in newer Ubuntu releases.
So I didn't actually get to a working Xournal++ build. Of course, with some more effort I'm sure I could get it to build, see what shape it's in, then file some bugs and maybe submit some patches. But should I? In other words, is Xournal++ still considered the future?
Xournal is an awesome program and I'd like to see it evolve and thrive. That means evolving either the existing Xournal code base forward (incorporating pending patches and working towards migrating to GTK 3), or resurrecting Xournal++ and trying to get momentum there. Denis, do you have an opinion about which path makes sense at this point?
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Honestly still not sure about this one. I am still working a bit on xournal, albeit not adding large new features (partly due to lack of time, partly due to the set of features being mostly fine despite everyone in the world having their pet missing feature that they like to complain about). The gtk3 evolution has been looked into seriously by Daniel German and he has a gtk3 version of xournal that works mostly fine but remains not ready for prime time due to performance issues with the gtk3 canvas.
For the typical user who doesn't feel that evolution for the sake of evolution is necessary, plain xournal is probably still the way to go. That said, I'm the kind of person who feels that Microsoft products reached their peak with Windows XP and Word 2000 and have been in a slow decline ever since, iOS 6 was infinitely better than iOS 7, and Gnome 3 is a large step backwards compared to Gnome 2.
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Since this thread is about xournal/xournal++ and their future...
I would like to let you know about another very closely related
project "hoodle" which is a pen notetaking program entirely written in
haskell.
Originally, hoodle started as a clone of xournal, being rewritten in
haskell from scratch. I was also contributing to xournal, and I even
named hoodle as hxournal at first.
So hoodle has some compatibility with xournal; it can read xournal
file format and convert to hoodle file format.
In terms of features, hoodle is quite equivalent to xournal, notably
pdf annotation.
In addition, hoodle has many unique features compared with xournal,
especially splitting view, embedding latex, linking documents and so
on.
Please find the project : http://ianwookim.org/hoodle
There you can also watch a youtube video (2012 Dec version) which
shows several features of hoodle.
The web page is a little outdated. The current version of hoodle is 0.3.
Honestly still not sure about this one. I am still working a bit on xournal,
albeit not adding large new features (partly due to lack of time, partly due
to the set of features being mostly fine despite everyone in the world
having their pet missing feature that they like to complain about). The gtk3
evolution has been looked into seriously by Daniel German and he has a gtk3
version of xournal that works mostly fine but remains not ready for prime
time due to performance issues with the gtk3 canvas.
For the typical user who doesn't feel that evolution for the sake of
evolution is necessary, plain xournal is probably still the way to go. That
said, I'm the kind of person who feels that Microsoft products reached their
peak with Windows XP and Word 2000 and have been in a slow decline ever
since, iOS 6 was infinitely better than iOS 7, and Gnome 3 is a large step
backwards compared to Gnome 2.
As has been discussed on this forum, a rewrite of Xournal in C++ called Xournal++ was underway a couple of years ago. Denis (the main Xournal author and maintainer) said back in May 2011 that he wasn't likely to accept many more patches for Xournal because "Andreas' work on Xournal++ will be ready for public release fairly soon".
Alas, at this point there's only been 1 (trivial) commit to Xournal++ in the last 15 months, so it looks as if that project is either stalled or dead. Yesterday I tried to build Xournal++ to see where it stands. (It took me a minute to realize that git holds the Xournal code, and the Xournal++ code is in the svn repository.) There are a couple of challenges to building. First, Xournal++ won't build with a current build of Poppler (I have 0.20.5 in Ubuntu 13.10, which is not even as new as the latest 0.22.2 release). It apparently uses internal Poppler APIs which have changed to use different numbers of arguments. Also, it expects an internal Poppler header file called CairoOutputDev.h to be installed on the user's system. Ubuntu used to distribute that header in the libpoppler-dev package back in Precise (12.04), but it's not present in newer Ubuntu releases.
So I didn't actually get to a working Xournal++ build. Of course, with some more effort I'm sure I could get it to build, see what shape it's in, then file some bugs and maybe submit some patches. But should I? In other words, is Xournal++ still considered the future?
Xournal is an awesome program and I'd like to see it evolve and thrive. That means evolving either the existing Xournal code base forward (incorporating pending patches and working towards migrating to GTK 3), or resurrecting Xournal++ and trying to get momentum there. Denis, do you have an opinion about which path makes sense at this point?
Honestly still not sure about this one. I am still working a bit on xournal, albeit not adding large new features (partly due to lack of time, partly due to the set of features being mostly fine despite everyone in the world having their pet missing feature that they like to complain about). The gtk3 evolution has been looked into seriously by Daniel German and he has a gtk3 version of xournal that works mostly fine but remains not ready for prime time due to performance issues with the gtk3 canvas.
For the typical user who doesn't feel that evolution for the sake of evolution is necessary, plain xournal is probably still the way to go. That said, I'm the kind of person who feels that Microsoft products reached their peak with Windows XP and Word 2000 and have been in a slow decline ever since, iOS 6 was infinitely better than iOS 7, and Gnome 3 is a large step backwards compared to Gnome 2.
Hi, all,
Since this thread is about xournal/xournal++ and their future...
I would like to let you know about another very closely related
project "hoodle" which is a pen notetaking program entirely written in
haskell.
Originally, hoodle started as a clone of xournal, being rewritten in
haskell from scratch. I was also contributing to xournal, and I even
named hoodle as hxournal at first.
So hoodle has some compatibility with xournal; it can read xournal
file format and convert to hoodle file format.
In terms of features, hoodle is quite equivalent to xournal, notably
pdf annotation.
In addition, hoodle has many unique features compared with xournal,
especially splitting view, embedding latex, linking documents and so
on.
Please find the project : http://ianwookim.org/hoodle
There you can also watch a youtube video (2012 Dec version) which
shows several features of hoodle.
The web page is a little outdated. The current version of hoodle is 0.3.
Thank you for your interests.
best,
Ian-Woo Kim
On Wed, Jul 2, 2014 at 3:54 PM, Denis Auroux auroux@users.sf.net wrote: