An introduction to the Emacs Reader

Divyá - IRC: divya, Website: https://www.phimulambda.org Mastodon: https://mathstodon.xyz/@divyaranjan, divya@subvertising.org

Format: 20-min talk ; Q&A: BigBlueButton conference room
Status: Waiting for video from speaker

Description

This talk will introduce a new document reader that I have been building for Emacs since the last few months. I will showcase the basic features of the document reader, how well it integrates with Emacs and the performance and other improvements that it provides in comparision to the existing document viewing options such as DocView, PDF Tools and others.

I will also describe the core architectural decisions that were made, specficially the fact that it is a dynamic module and the pains and pleasures of interfacing Emacs with C and vice-versa.

I will give a high-level tour of the codebase, which is pretty small as of now (<3K LOC), so that if a fellow Emacs developer wishes to contribute, they know where and how to get started.

In conclusion, I'll summarize the current features we're in the process of developing, what challenges we're facing in diong so, and what we wish to work on for the upcoming versions of the package.

About the speaker:

I’m Divyá from India. My background has been as a mathematics teacher and now I'm a programmer. I’ve been hacking on free software as a hobby and, for the past three to four years, living inside Emacs. I loved reading PDFs in Emacs via pdf-tools, but poor hardware and maintenance gaps pushed me to build a faster reader. I learned MuPDF and Emacs Dynamic Modules and wrote The Emacs Reader: a dynamic-module-based, high-performance, resource-friendly document viewer for Emacs that supports PDFs and other formats (EPUB, CBZ) while integrating natively with Emacs.

Questions or comments? Please e-mail divya@subvertising.org

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