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Encryption support for okular OOo reader

Friday, 14 December 2007  |  brad hards

You may (or may not) know that Okular can read the Oasis Open Document format (aka OpenOffice.org text format or OpenDocument). It doesn't render the document exactly as oowriter would, but it is quite a bit faster to start up :-) I tried to open an encrypted document with it though, and it failed. A couple of evenings later, and I have a patch that "fixes" Okular.

The patch basically adds support for parsing the manifest file, and uses QCA to provide the necessary cryptographic primitives. QCA is supposed to be an optional compile-time dependency.

I don't think this type of thing really qualifies as a bug fix (and it does introduce quite a few new strings), so I'm not going to apply it so late in the KDE4.0.0 release cycle.

I would appreciate some help with testing though. You can get the patch from the okular-devel mailing list archives.

It will only actually decrypt the file if you have built QCA from subversion, or have a beta3 (or later, but there aren't any) release of the plugins. Not having QCA or only having an old version of the plugins would still be a valid test though - the patch is supposed to deal with that sort of issue.