On Tue, 2009-02-03 at 17:09 +0100, Matthias Kirschner wrote:
I spoke with Hannes and Henner on that subject. What do you think about the following proposal. We list all PDF readers, which are Free Software and "actively maintained". How Free Software is defined should be know to all here. For "Actively mainted" we should find a good criteria (e.g. answeres on bug reports, latest commits in the past year...).
I more or less agree with this. There are some potential issues though:
* There might be a case where a good PDF viewer is available and working just fine, but not actively maintained at the moment. The current version of Xpdf was released in 2007 for instance
* There might be actively maintained Free Software that can read PDF files, but does not have just that as its primary function. It may seem that this is the case with MuPDF: "MuPDF is a PDF parser that reads PDF files and creates Fitz trees."
On the list we remove the footnote "[2] Additional software may be required to use this program." But we add a paragraph that for "normal users" (find a better term) the pdfreaders team suggest the software which has a green background in the table. We add that green background for the most convinient readers like evience + okular for Free operating systems, skim for MacOSx, and sumatrapdf for Windows. And things like okular for windows, yap, etc. will not get that green background.
Something along those lines sounds good. I also might suggest using "most popular" as opposed to "for normal users" as the criterium for choosing which readers to "recommend". This will most likely end up being the "most convenient" readers anyway.
all the best, /Stian