Hello and welcome to my first-ever blog! This is written as part of my work for KDE for GSoC '23.
About Me
My name is Shivodit Gill, I am a second-year student studying Bachelor of Computer Applications (BCA) in India. This is my first ever Google Summer of Code, so I'm eager to get started and learn new things.
I'm looking forward to increasing my capabilities and writing code that could (possibly!) find a home in the code repositories of popular apps, and be of use to people around the world. Together with my mentor, Albert Astals Cid (aacid@kde.org), I feel ready to tackle this challenge.
My project
For GSoC '23 I will be working on Okular for Android, and implementing the following features:
A font-fetching API for Android
This will use the AFontMatcher API introduced in Android API 29 to fetch the required font files to properly display text in pdfs that do not embed their fonts.
Fixing icon rendering in Okular for Android
Currently, Okular for Android has issues with the rendering of icons - almost none of the icons are shown. I hope to find the root cause of this issue and fix it.
Possible Challenges:
There are a few challenges I will face in my project:
My lack of Android development experience
Android follows a very different approach to debugging and developing applications. This combined with my inexperience in Android development will prove to be a massive obstacle.
Using the QtCreator debugger and compilation environment with the KDE Android development docker image does not work - I have tried and have not yet gotten it to work. It seems that this is a common problem and another developer has stated in the kde-android matrix room that they have to use logcat and print debugging.
However, I am hopeful that with the help of my mentors and enough perseverance, I will be able to overcome these challenges.
Thanks for reading, have a nice day!