[FM Discuss] Objavi news

[Douglas Bagnall]

hello,

I haven't written anything about Objavi for months because I've been
away doing something entirely different.  I'm back now though, and I
see that a large population of bugs have been uncovered.  Classified
by their likely cause, with bug numbers from
http://booki-zip.flossmanuals.net, the main categories are:

1. Problems with the interaction between Booki and Objavi.  The two
are speaking slightly different languages and are unforgiving of each
other.  All kinds of odd things are caused by this.  Parts of books are
sometimes doubled (#198) or missing (#196, #209), options are not
working (#208), and the metadata is a mess (unreported, but we
know). Also, some useful Objavi controls (like CSS substitution, #88)
are completely obscured.  These bugs are revealing themselves now
because people are using Booki instead of old Twiki FM.

2. Unsatisfactory page layout, due to the rendering engine being
useless in certain regards and/or the CSS guiding it being wrong. As a
reminder, we switched from using Reportlab/Pisa in Objavi 1 to Webkit
in Objavi 2 for the sake of bidirectional text, but in doing so we
lost some control over the placement of page breaks.  Webkit thinks
it's a browser, not a typographer.  The main bugs here are #2 and #9,
which shows how long it has been an issue.  People are working on this
upstream, and although it is slow work we can incorporate their
changes as they become available.  This gradual change is not entirely
with problems: in the last few days Objavi has started observing the
'page-break-inside: avoid' CSS rule, which has suddenly switched on
rules that were lying dormant in Objavi's CSS.  Books will be
different this week, whether for better or worse.

3. Objavi's controls are confusing, so people think it can't do
something that it can.  This is compounded by item 1 above, because
different things work depending on whether you're looking at Objavi
through Booki or through it's own interface.

4. The Internet Archive integration needs work, but that is another
whole story.

5. Lots of things are actually, mysteriously, broken in Objavi itself.

My plan is to attack set 1 (booki-objavi communication) first.  These
are understandable, the results will be good, and it needs to be done.
Solutions to the layout problems can hopefully be borrowed from
upstream sources as they become available.  This is a big issue though
and if progress slows we might even switch to using the Gecko
rendering engine.  And the other bugs will be fixed if you complain
enough and give *detailed* bug reports.

cheers,

Douglas