New Timeline guessing and Semi-Hiatus

Back in August I made some guesses about what parts I would do in what sequence, and how long those would take. I think I'll review my timeline and see how it's going. Here's what I said I'd do:

• ✓ Code review of several modules
• ✓ Revise editview to get rid of QT Creator glop code
• ✓ Find panel
• ✓ Chardata and charview panel
• ✓ Wordview, including good-words drag'n'drop UI

So while that all took about 3 weeks longer than I planned, it is done. Yay me! Remaining, per the August plan, are

• pageview, the Page table panel
• fnotedata and fnoteview, the Footnotes panel
• loupeview, integration with bookloupe
• translate, code to parse a DP-formatted book and use it to drive the extremely clever API that I have devised for writing format-translation modules.

I believe I will rearrange the above sequence and do loupeview next. Footnote and pagination are fairly sophisticated proofing tools, while applying bookloupe or some such nit-picking tool is needed when post-processing even simple books. With Find, Word, Char and Loupe you have a toolkit adequate for many simple books.

I remarked in August that regarding bookloupe "there are many unknowns about how to integrate this hunk of somebody else's C code into Python and to display its output in a useful way." That's still very true, however there are at least two tools that might make integration of "somebody else's C" easier. One is SWIG and the other is Cython. There is also the easy way, which is really not easy at all: save the current file to a temp, and use subprocess to run the bookloupe as a command-line utility and capture its stdout stream. This is fraught with host dependency issues like, where to write a temp file?

Anyway, all of that will be a bit delayed as I and spouse are about to head out on a 2-week run in the RV. I may get some coding, and even some blogging, done on this trip, but it will be spotty.

Another interfering factor: in late October (barely a month now), Qt 5.4 will be released, and it contains the new QWebEngine browser. I am looking forward to this because of my other project, the web-comic browser Cobro. I read web comics every day in it, and about 1 day in 3, it crashes somewhere in QWebKit. I don't mind; I just restart it and carry on. But I can't make it available to anyone else when it is so unstable. I have high hopes that by upgrading it to Qt 5.4 (and presumably, PyQt5.4 and an upgraded SIP by then), and dumping QWebKit for QWebEngine, I will get a faster and more stable program.

If so, then CoBro will also be the perfect test bed for me to learn how to use pyqtdeploy, and with it make stand-alone CoBro apps for three platforms. Those two challenges are likely to eat up at least a week, probably more.

But with that done, especially if I can master pyqtdeploy, I will be in position to release a stand-alone, multi-platform alpha of ppqt2 sometime quite early in 2015.