What is the future of qpdfview?

Thanks for your support. The short answer is: Maybe. The long answer is:

The reason for the existence of this program is that a friend of mine recently made the switch to Linux and complained that Evince does not support tabs. We discussed that this a well-motivated decision by the Evince developers due to the 'one document one window' paradigm that GNOME generally follows. We then decided to just try to write a tabbed PDF viewer and publish it as an exercise in 'applied free software.' But to be honest, we did not make any long term plans whatsoever.

And as I'm actually a physics student and not a software engineer, my knowledge and capabilities are probably quite limited. So I'm not sure how far I can take this project. But it also means that I'm not overly protective towards the code base. So we should just decide together what the future of qpdfview will be. And by all means, you may contribute. I will not oppose any direction in which users and especially contributers want to take this project.

So I suppose to go forward, the next things to do are releasing version 0.2 on Sunday if nobody reports any bugs until then, establishing a Launchpad team and especially a mailing list to start discussing specific plans and I will definitely have to start to comment the source code. I know that this is not really an answer to your question but hopefully these steps are satisfactory to you and we will be able to work that future out. (As I will be quite occupied this weekend, all of this will probably not happen before Sunday evening.)

Concerning specific points you raised:
- Portability is currently just a side effect of sticking to the Qt interfaces. Even though I think qpdfview should currently run on Windows and I never tested it as I do not have access to a copy of that operating system. But I'm completely open to making this work on different platforms if this is possible in a more of less generic way.
- Okular is a very powerful and mature application. I'm not sure if it is sensible to replicate all its functionality. Especially supporting back ends different from Poppler will probably require adding some additional abstractions. But I definitely agree that qpdfview is currently lacking important features in comparison and that Okular is a very sensible place to look for inspiration.
- Plans for world domination are always appreciated. :-)

So I have created on open Launchpad team with a mailing list at https://launchpad.net/~qpdfview if you want to shape the future of qpdfview.

Although I have no experience with Qt, I do have some C++ experience. I've looked over the source a few times, but I didn't feel confident to make significant changes. Still, I'm very interested in the project's direction, and will definitely contribute in some capacity when I'm not swamped with school and personal obligations. In any case, I've joined the new mailing list, so that's a step in the right direction.

Of course, contributions can be a lot of things besides coding. Testing and bug reporting. Building or packaging the program. Also the documentation is currently very lacking. But also giving advice and opinions is very much appreciated.

The code itself is probably not very inviting at the moment. At least it is decidedly undocumented which will have to change is there is to be a significant level of collaboration. Seems like I have some work cut out for me. :-\ (Why does one always fall into this 'I can always comment this later on.' trap?)

The necessary infrastructure for a more collaborative planning and development is in place.