New Virtual Buffers now in Main Code Base!

Last September, Mick started completely refactoring our virtual buffer library, a task which ended up becoming almost a complete redesign. This new library is called nvVBufLib. Over the last few months, he has been working on porting the Mozilla Gecko back-end to the new library. We encountered a few major hiccups along the way, which have now thankfully been solved.

Meanwhile, a few weeks ago, I decided to try my hand at implementing a new Adobe Acrobat/Reader back-end for this new library. In addition, Mick recently started implementing a back-end for Microsoft Internet Explorer. This means that support for Adobe Reader and Internet Explorer is now unified with the same core code used for Mozilla Gecko, which means that features such as fast page rendering, extensive quick navigation, links list, text selection, auto focus mode and braille support are now available with these documents.

I'm happy to announce that I've just merged all of this code into the main code base, which means it will also be available in binary snapshots. This is obviously very exciting! However, while the new code appears to be relatively stable, there may still be serious bugs which need to be resolved. Also note that the Internet Explorer support is still not yet complete; form fields may not appear, some controls may not be rendered, there may be problems with frames and the buffer is not updated dynamically, just to list a few of the big issues. Having said this, if you're willing to live on the bleeding edge, please do test and shoot us your feedback! Those of you who aren't willing to deal with problems should probably avoid snapshots for a while until things settle down.

Enjoy!