Welcome to Lucide

Lucide is a plugin based document viewer for OS/2 and derivative operating systems, which currently supports PDF, DjVu, and a number of image format files (JPG, through the included plugin, and many bitmap formats through the Generalised Bitmap Module, available ​here. Support for new document types may be added as additional plugins.

Important Note

If you are currently testing Lucide 1.3.6 RC2a, and find that after upgrading poppler beyond 0.42.0 you can no longer load the PDF plugin to view PDFs, please review the notes in ticket #297.

Current Status

Licensing

• Versions 1.30 and higher have been released and distributed under CDDL/LGPL (dual license model).
• Versions up through 1.21 were only released in binary form, under a proprietary license.

Development & Release

Development of Lucide has been renewed as of December, 2015, in cooperation with Arca Noae, LLC and affiliated developers. Further details regarding new releases will be made as work progresses.

For the latest releases, see Latest Versions, below.

Additional software prerequisites

It is strongly recommended to install from RPM, though WPI is still supported for most prerequisites:

If you use RPM, you should install the following with the single command for versions up through 1.3.5:

yum install libc libgcc1 libgcc-fwd gcc-stdc++6 gcc-supc++6 uclip

or use Arca Noae Package Manager's Quick install feature (YUM | Quick install...) and paste the following into the dialog box:

libc libgcc1 libgcc-fwd gcc-stdc++6 gcc-supc++6 uclip

For WPI:

kLibc 0.6.6 Library	​WPI	kLibc Runtime libraries
GCC 4 Core Libraries	​WPI	GCC 4 runtime libraries
UClip	​WPI	enhanced OS/2 clipboard support

For version 1.3.6 and newer, the Quick install list is:

libc libgcc1 libgcc-fwd gcc-stdc++6 gcc-supc++6 poppler poppler-data uclip

To have Japanese fonts working in 1.3.6 you need the poppler-data package. This is listed above. If you do not wish to add such support, you may omit it from the Quick install list.

Latest Versions

The latest stable version is 1.3.5, released September 14, 2012. The list of changes may be found here.

The latest beta version is 1.3.6 RC2a, dated August 20, 2016, and its changelog may be found here​.

Lucide is available for downloading in the following packages and formats:

Component	Package	Version	Description
Lucide executable and plugins	​WPI	1.3.5	updated poppler lib
Lucide executable and plugins	​ZIP	1.3.5	updated poppler lib
Lucide executable and plugins	​ZIP	1.3.6 RC2a	Release Candidate 2a

User's Guide

Lucide has a new user's guide available for download (and it will be included in the 1.3.6 release). It is a work in progress, and this is the first draft. Users of Lucide - experienced or new - are encouraged to download the help manual and read it with View or NewView (it is not yet linked from the program's main menu).

There are fairly extensive sections not only on program usage, but also on PDF, DjVu, and JPEG formats, PDF encryption types (whether supported by Lucide or not), and other interesting (we hope) bits. The guide itself constitutes over 80 hours of research and formatting. Comments welcome; please open a ticket if you find something missing or in error.

​Lucide User's Guide

Mailing Lists

There are currently two mailing lists for Lucide: one for users, and one for developers. If you want to join either or both, please read ​the instructions on the Netlabs Wiki. As the Gmane web service shut down at the end of July, 2016, you may access the list archives via NNTP, here:

• ​news://news.gmane.org/gmane.org.netlabs.lucide.devel
• ​news://news.gmane.org/gmane.org.netlabs.lucide.general

Bugs & Features

Lucide remains a work in progress, with some features still to be added and some long-standing issues to be addressed. If you encounter an issue or have an enhancement request, you are welcome to register it as a new ​ticket. Please make sure you check the list of open tickets first, to see if your issue may have already been reported. Also, try to assign it to the correct component of the program; this is quite easy to do with TRAC. We will do our best to review tickets regularly and will leave comments if we need more info. Please revisit the ​Feedback analysis for overall status updates. If we leave a comment and still do not receive a response from the ticket creator, the issue will likely be closed in a reasonable amount of time.

Anonymous access to the ticket system has been restricted due to multiple spam attacks. In order to create a new ticket or comment on an existing one, you will need to log in with your Netlabs login id. If you do not have a login id, you may request one at ​http://www.netlabs.org/en/site/member/member.xml. We are sorry for inconvenience, but at the present time, this is the only way we may avoid extremely annoying (and time-wasting) spam.

Developers

We are currently seeking interested developers to take Lucide to the next level, adding features like tabbed viewing, more flexible print layouts, context-sensitive help, more intuitive user interface, and better rendering performance.

Plugin API

The plugin API uses SOM. This allows programmers to write their own plugins without the need to recompile them every time a new Lucide release is done. It's up to the developer to decide if the plugin he/she writes will be open source or not; Lucide, due to its being dual-licensed, will work with both type of plugins.

Please read How to write your own plugins for Lucide.

Plugin Source Code

You may download the sources for all of our plugins directly from the svn repository. If you have any problems, please post to the developer list.

• The svn trunk contains some external libraries (libdjvu, libjpg) and the source for all Lucide plugins. (Note that one of the new design goals is to remove Lucide's dependence on special library builds and to utilize the system-installed ones. Thus, poppler is no longer included in this repository.)

Building Lucide

• BuildingInstructions (current as of the 1.3.6 release cycle)