Welcome to Caly Pdf Reader Discussions!

[BobLd]

👋 Welcome!

We’re using Discussions as a place to connect with other members of our community. We hope that you:

• Ask questions you’re wondering about.
• Share ideas.
• Engage with other community members.
• Welcome others and are open-minded. Remember that this is a community we build together 💪.

[zkvii]

I am very interested in Caly, but it would be even better if there is a WinUI branch.

[BobLd]

@zkvii thanks a lot for your interest, at the moment there's no plan for a WinUI version. May I ask why you'd like WinUI instead of Avalonia?

[zkvii]

For a PDF reader, Avalonia might already be powerful enough. However, I have the following considerations:

• Its visual effects can't be compared to WinUI.

• Additionally, whether it's Rider or Visual Studio, the error output positioning is frustrating. I don't understand why it can't directly pinpoint the error location.

Avalonia seems simpler and easier to learn compared to WinUI, but it appears that many of Caly's current bugs are related to Avalonia controls rather than rendering.skia. If I were to develop Caly using WinUI, I might use win2D/Direct2D as the rendering engine. However, these are just some personal considerations. Of course, the main challenge of a PDF reader lies in parsing, not in the UI framework.

[Leftyx]

I am also interested in the project but do not quite understand the scope.
Could you provide a bit more background in the description ?

[BobLd]

@Leftyx thanks! I agree the description needs to be improved.

The aim of the repo is to develop a C# cross-platform open source pdf reader/viewer application, with the following abilities:

• View pdf document
• Open many documents with a tab system
• Navigate and zoom document (go to page, zoom in/out, etc.)
• Select text and copy to clipboard
• Search text

Other plans for later:

• OCR
• Table extraction

Pdf document editing is not planned for the moment, but could be added later on.

The application uses Avalonia as the UI framework. The pdf rendering to image is done with PdfPig.Rendering.Skia, which is another project I started.

You should be able to clone and build the repo on your machine, let me know if you have difficulties with that

I hope that helps!

[Leftyx]

Thanks for the swift reply and explanation.
I might be able to help a bit with the OCR as I have invested a fair amount of time recently working on it.