Acts of Volition

Using PDF documents on Linux used to be quite unpleasant. The PDF viewing apps were ancient and ugly and the quality of the rendering was nasty.

Today, though, the picture is much better. OpenOffice.org does a great job of creating PDFs and a relatively new viewing application called Evince has made browsing/reading a pleasure.

Evince is a lot like the Preview application on Mac OS X. One thing that Preview.app does well, though, that Evince cannot do is display Photoshop files (PSD).

While the Gimp can open/save PSD files, it does not support Photoshop layer-effects and some of the layer-mask features. The end result is that many Photoshop files look broken/incomplete.

Preview.app manages to show pixel-perfect previews of Photoshop files, including complex layer masks and effects. I presume (but don’t know), that preview is using a flattened bitmap that is included in the Photoshop file rather than parsing/rendering all of the layer effects itself. If anyone can confirm/deny that this is the case, please do.

If it is indeed the case that Photoshop files include a flat bitmap of rendered version of the file, presumably Evince to use this to preview PSD files.

The Offer

This isn’t the kind of thing I’m capable of doing myself, but I would love to see it happen so I am putting out a bounty out for this to be done. I’m willing to pay $100 USD to the person who can implement PSD viewing in Evince.

Requirements for Payment:

• Evince must display recent Photoshop (6, 7, CSx) PSD files accurately, including layer effects and other complex Photoshop-specific visuals.
• The code must be included upstream in Evince. If they don’t accept your code, you don’t get paid. I’d suggest getting in touch with the Evince maintainers and keep in touch with them during your development. If you do all the work and they don’t commit it, you’re out of luck. Note that I have not been in touch with the Evince maintainers about this.
• The code must be committed upstream by the end of 2006.
• If there are intellectual property issues that prevent the code from being included in Evince, the offer is off the table - you might want to investigate this first.
• Money will be sent via PayPal after the code has been committed upstream in Evince.
• If multiple people complete the project, the one who gets their code (or the majority of it) committed will get the bounty.
• If no one completes the project, I will keep the money for myself and roll around in it.

If you do have a go at this, contact me and let me know you’re working on it and I’ll give you a heads up in case it’s already underway somewhere else.

$100!?! Screw you! That barely pays for an hour of work

Yeah, I know. $100 is not a lot of money. I’m not trying to hire someone to write this code and I have no illusions that this is even close to enough money to actually cover the work required. Rather, I’m doing this as a cheap stunt to get the attention of someone who might have been interested in doing this anyhow.