Google Summer of Code 2012 - The Linux Foundation accepted!

[ Subject corrected. ]

Hi,

Google has accepted The Linux Foundation again as mentoring organization!

Please spread the news and keep adding project ideas.

Till

I've been interested in working on the pdf manipulation tools already back in 2008, when I implemented the pdftoijs and texttopdf filters as GSoC-Project. So I'm quite thrilled to hear, that now, nearly having completed university, I might have the ability to work on them, and participate in GSoC again.

Through work on my low-level pdf library unpdf ( http://code.google.com/p/unpdf/ ) I have gained much knowledge on PDF internals (Adobe's PDF Reference, different PDF versions, etc) and implementation caveats. Although the current unpdf code-base implements enough of the low-level handling (also e.g. including support for encrypted pdfs) to build the desired tools upon, there are a significant number of areas in need of work; another possibility would be to either reimplement only the bare minimum of functionality (i.e. use unpdf, and maybe other pdf libs like iText only as guideline) or use another pdf i/o library as basis (podofo comes to mind, http://podofo.sourceforge.net/ ; a pure C choice with good-looking codebase could be MuPDF, http://mupdf.com/ <http://mupdf.com/>). But theses details can be worked out in time. FWIW, I personally would strongly prefer C++0x/C++11 (esp. auto, std::unique_ptr, rvalue references / std::move) for this project, instead of trying to work around language limitations that will not gain us anything in the long term -- if this is possible.

Tobias