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[David Boddie]

John J. Lee wrote:

> Alternatively, if you feel rather adventurous, try compiling KPDF on
> Windows with the free Qt3 port(s?) or Qt4, if that's arrived yet.

I think you might be slightly too optimistic about getting KPDF to run
natively on Windows. The project you mention does have a page
describing how to run KDE 3.4 on Windows, but I think that may be
taking things further than the original poster intended:

http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/kde3/index.php

I believe someone is working on a Qt 4 renderer for Poppler, a PDF
rendering library based on xpdf, so it could potentially be used in an
application on Windows:

http://poppler.freedesktop.org/

> If you're successful there, you still need to figure out writing KPart
> plugins in Python, which certainly used to be tricky, but maybe that's
> a solved problem by now...

Writing KPart plugins in Python (for embedding into applications) was
never all _that_ tricky; it just required some messing around with
shared libraries. As it turns out, you don't need to do this if you
just want to control KPDF from a client application written in Python.
There are two approaches you can take (for Windows users, this is
where we go off-topic):

 1. Use DCOP to control two running instances of KPDF. At the simplest
    level, you could use the popen2 module and the "dcop" tool to
    control what KPDF displays. This could be integrated into a client
    application to varying degrees, with the application getting the
    window manager to do things with window placement, but it would
    probably end up being a lot of effort for less than the desired
    result.

    http://developer.kde.org/documentation/tutorials/

 2. Use the kparts module from PyKDE to display KPDF KParts in the
    client application's GUI. You can still control the KParts via
    their DCOP interfaces, and you can call methods on them directly
    to, for example, open specific URLs or add user interface elements.

    http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/pykde/

Since I discovered how easy it was to embed KPDF like this, it makes
me want to experiment more with using KParts in Python. It's already
trivial to use KHTML from Python, and KParts like these could be used
to create specialised tools for documentation and visualisation.

David