I've upgraded the QuestPDF Companion project to Avalonia 11. While a few adjustments were needed, the official guide is detailed and accurate. I'm genuinely impressed with the new version's stability. Those quirks and glitches I ran into earlier are fixed now. Turns out they were library bugs, not my lack of understanding, which gives me more confidence.

Kudos to the Avalonia team; the new version is very imposing!

I am planning to share a few screenshots soon, followed by making the code public. While it's still a work in progress, the current version gives a glimpse into the direction I'm taking.

I'm at a crossroads about continuing with Avalonia or switching gears to Flutter. However, it's less about the platform's evolution and more about the overall development paradigm. With rumors of Flutter possibly transitioning to the Propeler engine and away from Skia, I fear future integration challenges between QuestPDF and the Companion tool.

This effort is not my highest priority at this moment, so there is still time for experimentation 😀

Introduction

Several months ago, QuestPDF underwent a significant update, transitioning from SkiaSharp to a custom-built Skia dependency. This remarkable transition was a testament to the power of our community, whose invaluable feedback, testing, and suggestions made it all possible. Building on this positive experience, we're excited to initiate a similar collaborative process for designing the next generation of the QuestPDF Companion application.

Current progress

While this post doesn't detail the entire roadmap, we want to share that development has been ongoing for months and is now close to the public release. Recent QuestPDF updates have introduced key changes and features to facilitate this effort, which is now our primary focus.

The QuestPDF Companion will be an essential tool for all QuestPDF developers. We've previously shared ideas for advanced tooling and will regularly post screenshots and descriptions of specific features. We encourage you to share your thoughts and suggestions as we iterate on the design.

Technicals

From a technical standpoint, the application will be built using Flutter and support Windows, MacOS, and Linux platforms. It will be directly downloaded from the project homepage rather than as a NuGet package.

First screenshot

We're excited to share a screenshot of the application's home screen. Say goodbye to the empty gray QuestPDF Previewer!

Document Preview Interactions

The new QuestPDF Companion application introduces more sophisticated ways to interact with your documents, offering a deeper understanding of their structure and the size of each element. This ultimately shortens the feedback loop and makes it easier to fine-tune every aspect of the document's look and feel.

The application includes four tools, each accessible with easy-to-remember shortcuts:

• Magnifier [key 1]
• Show details of the current point with magnet capability (including page number, X and Y coordinates) [key 2]
• Measure content vertically [key 3]
• Measure content horizontally [key 4]

The video below demonstrates these tools in action:

Document Hierarchy and Previewer Interactions

Today, I'd like to introduce a set of new interactions between two key components of our application:

• Document Hierarchy: Displays the entire document structure and content in a tree view.
• Document Preview: Shows the document content in a rendered, visual format.

By watching the video, you will discover several important features, including but not limited to:

• Element Selection: Double-click anywhere in the preview to select the hovered element (typically the smallest and nearest element).
• Focus Enhancement: When an element is selected, all content outside of it is blurred to improve readability and focus.
• Hover Highlights: Hovering over elements in the Document Hierarchy tree view temporarily highlights the related content in the preview area.
• Detailed View: When an element is selected, additional details are displayed, such as its size, position on the screen, and key properties.
• Multi-Page Navigation: If an element spans multiple pages, you can navigate between these locations using arrow buttons.