| # | User | Message | Date |
| 555 | Pavel | Reichart PDF was created in the way no executable postript code could be possible (no if no jumps no execute AND no write to disc) That is main advatage of PDF. Anyway it is possible to PDF contains tons of shit never would be imaged on page (old versions of documents for example). | 24-Apr 8:01 |
| 554 | Reichart | Also, keep in mind, PDF can contain all sorts of junk... Go here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format Jump to PostScript.... | 19-Apr 16:48 |
| 553 | Reichart | Depends on the PDF editor and how it was saved. Yes, it can be compressed. Yes, it can be protected (encrypted). It can also be just PostScript at its core. | 19-Apr 16:45 |
| 552 | amacleod | Is a pdf file compressed or encrypted. Is there anyway to parse it? | 19-Apr 15:51 |
| 551 | Graham | no | 19-Apr 4:17 |
| 550 | amacleod | Is there any way to go from pdf to makedoc format? | 19-Apr 2:14 |
| 549 | Anton | There are tools (which I know of) in linux such as pdftotext. I presume the web links would appear in the output text, then you can use rebol parse to extract the links from that. | 26-Mar 12:20 |
| 548 | Rondon | Folks, I'm having a problem. How can I extract just the web links inside a pdf ? | 6-Mar 11:02 |
| 547 | Graham | unless it's one of those compressed pdf formats | 26-Jun-07 1:58 |
| 546 | Graham | postscript and pdf are similar formats and store images as either binary or as text. | 26-Jun-07 1:58 |
| 545 | btiffin | Well, I hacked it...and have no clue if what I did would work the next time :) | 26-Jun-07 1:20 |
| 544 | Chris | Ah, you got it... | 26-Jun-07 1:14 |
| 543 | Chris | Depends -- do you want to retain vector artwork? If not, you could rasterise it in Photoshop, GIMP, Seashore or other bitmap editors. | 26-Jun-07 1:13 |
| 542 | btiffin | It's a binary, but I've extracted it. Thanks for the hint. | 26-Jun-07 1:12 |
| 541 | Graham | :) | 26-Jun-07 1:02 |
| 540 | Graham | text editor | 26-Jun-07 1:02 |
| 539 | btiffin | Before I look into it, I thought I'd just ask. We (the graphic desgner actually) got sent a logo graphic inside a PDF (and that is all that's in the PDF). Is there an easy way of extracting the image? I'm not a huge fan of selecting and cut'n'paste as it may lose sizing etc... More curious than worried. | 26-Jun-07 0:14 |
| 538 | DaveC | change = chance. | 7-Jun-07 18:42 |
| 537 | DaveC | Haven't had change to look at V2 yet. | 7-Jun-07 18:42 |
| 536 | DaveC | Busy converting HTML template reports into PDF using PDF-Maker. Getting the hang of it now. The function which calculates the textbox height is providing most of the work. I'm calculating page space as text boxes are generated. As I think in point size, I've transposed mm2pt to give me a pt2mm function. | 7-Jun-07 18:42 |
| 535 | Gabriele | i don't have the time to write it at this moment... also, i'm sure someone other than me would have a more user-centric perspective. ie some of the stuff in v2 that seems trivial for me might not be so for other users. | 2-Jun-07 12:04 |
| 534 | Joe | Gabriele, it would be nice to have a smaller PDF doc for v2, like you had for v1. Any chance ? | 2-Jun-07 11:54 |
| 533 | DaveC | Thanks, that makes sense to me now. I'll have a bit more time tomorrow to think things through a bit more. | 31-May-07 19:47 |
| 532 | Gabriele | basically the above will render This is a test out of the visible area. | 31-May-07 19:21 |
| 531 | Gabriele | textbox default size is not dynamic, but static, so if you set a different page size you'll want to set a custom textbox size too | 31-May-07 19:21 |
| 530 | DaveC | The page does flip to landscape though. | 31-May-07 15:22 |
| 529 | DaveC | Umm. If I use this; page size 297 211 textbox ["This is a test"] the texbox does not render. If I comment out page size, it does. | 31-May-07 15:21 |
| 528 | Gabriele | unless you need the advanced features in v2, yes. | 31-May-07 15:18 |
| 527 | DaveC | Got it thanks. Maybe I should stick the V1 for now then. | 31-May-07 15:17 |
| 526 | Gabriele | http://www.colellachiara.com/soft/PDFM2/ | 31-May-07 15:17 |
| 525 | Gabriele | note, v2 is quite different from v1. it hasn't been tested as extensively as v1 either (v1 is being used on a daily basis in many applications). | 31-May-07 15:16 |
| 524 | DaveC | Can't see a link on that page to download the code. | 31-May-07 15:16 |
| 523 | DaveC | Let me see how I get on. I'd be happy to volunteer to write the user docs - I'm a bit under pressure at work right now, but I would really like to contribute something back to you. | 31-May-07 15:13 |
| 522 | DaveC | I can see that in the code. I'm just getting a feel for the basics at the moment. Ok, version 2 I'll get that. | 31-May-07 15:11 |
| 521 | Gabriele | still looking for someone volunteering to write the user docs... :) | 31-May-07 15:11 |
| 520 | Gabriele | btw, version 2 is at http://www.colellachiara.com/soft/PDFM2/pdf-maker.html | 31-May-07 15:10 |
| 519 | Gabriele | also, since the result is a block of pages, you can modify the result and add anything after the layout process. | 31-May-07 15:08 |
| 518 | Gabriele | 5th argument to render-pages is a function that is called to make the scheleton of each page. | 31-May-07 15:08 |
| 517 | DaveC | ok. | 31-May-07 15:06 |
| 516 | Gabriele | should be the latest 1.x version so you're fine. | 31-May-07 15:06 |
| 515 | DaveC | :-) | 31-May-07 15:06 |
| 514 | Gabriele | ah, right, that's the one with a few bugs fixed. | 31-May-07 15:05 |
| 513 | DaveC | pdf-maker: 1.27.1 3-Aug-2006 | 31-May-07 15:05 |
| 512 | DaveC | sorry, checking... | 31-May-07 15:04 |
| 511 | Gabriele | ah, 1.5.0 of pdf-tables. you should have 1.24.0 of pdf-maker | 31-May-07 15:04 |
| 510 | DaveC | in the header | 31-May-07 15:04 |
| 509 | DaveC | Yes, pdf-tables, date 24-Jul-2003 | 31-May-07 15:03 |
| 508 | Gabriele | really? of pdf-maker? | 31-May-07 15:02 |
| 507 | Gabriele | pdf-tables lets you provide a function to create the pages, and you can still modify the output. so, you can create the headings separate from the table itself. | 31-May-07 15:02 |
| 506 | DaveC | Version 1.5.0 | 31-May-07 15:02 |
| 505 | DaveC | hang on... | 31-May-07 15:02 |
| 504 | Gabriele | also, since you refer to pdf-tables, i assume you dowloaded version 1 | 31-May-07 15:01 |
| 503 | Gabriele | you may want to change the page size instead of rotating it. | 31-May-07 15:00 |
| 502 | DaveC | I've just downloaded pdf-maker.r and I'd really appreciate some help to get going quickly. I've rotated a page +90 to get into landscape, but the texbox still renders the text in the same way as portrait. Do I have to rotate each textbox too? I also downloaded pdf-tables.r too. Does a table handle a page break itself? Talking of page breaks, in a long table which spans many pages, I'd like to render the column headings on each new page. Is there a variable I can track or an event I can listen for that lets me know that the text is about to flow to the next page. Thanks a lot. | 31-May-07 14:56 |
| 501 | Gabriele | so i will either need to figure out how to create a font encoding description that works for utf-16 (but i guess it would require a huge table, and so would make the documents big), or i'll need to use the same technique as OO | 4-Mar-07 9:39 |
| 500 | Gabriele | that is, if you are using "Times", and you use more than 256 different characters, openoffice creates a pdf with two fonts, "Times1" and "Times2", each with at most 256 characters. | 4-Mar-07 9:38 |
| 499 | Gabriele | openoffice, for example, creates n 256-character fonts instead. | 4-Mar-07 9:37 |
| 498 | Gabriele | to support unicode you have to create a multibyte encoding for the fonts, and the spec does not give any detail on how this works. | 4-Mar-07 9:37 |
| 497 | Gabriele | oldes: unfortunately, no. he has to specify the encoding in the font description. the only "built-in" encodings are Adobe, WinANSI (latin1) and Mac. I think adobe is a variant of latin1. | 4-Mar-07 9:36 |
| 496 | Oldes | and which windows encoding? Maybe can janeks just set some flag or something which specifies his encoding in the file. | 3-Mar-07 10:35 |
| 495 | Oldes | really? I cannot believe that PDF is not able to be in unicode. What is adobe encoding? | 3-Mar-07 10:27 |
| 494 | Gabriele | the pdf format only supports adobe encoding, windows encoding and mac encoding. the pdf maker only uses windows encoding (which is basically latin1). | 3-Mar-07 9:56 |
| 493 | Janeks | Can I use scripts of Oldes to get right encoding output of pdf from pdfMaker? It seems that Rebol uses for my Win platform Win1257. In which encoding should I convert text for input to pdfMaker to get right accentuated characters in pdf generated by pdf maker? | 2-Mar-07 15:58 |
| 492 | Anton | Those are details. Any default is still better than an error (if trying to make the dialect forgiving and friendly). At least the user will see something appear, even if it has the wrong size and in the wrong position. | 26-Nov-06 0:53 |
| 491 | Gabriele | there's also the issue, that if we allow specifying a binary! instead of image! and interpert it as a jpeg file, then the dialect will have no default to use for the size, unless we go on and parse the jpeg header, or load the jpeg into a image! temporarily just to get its size. (binary! would have the added benefit to work also in Core, however that would only be for jpeg images) | 25-Nov-06 16:10 |
| 490 | Anton | On balance, (and since I discovered the resuling PDF was a bit large), I think it's not worth me forking and complicating the dialect. | 25-Nov-06 10:27 |
| 489 | Anton | You have, of course, the benefit of knowing how the dialect works inside out. People new to the dialect would like to find out how it works by experimenting. Then it would be good to be more friendly, not causing error on missing parameters, similar to LAYOUT. | 25-Nov-06 10:24 |
| 488 | Gabriele | well, i always output pdf from programs, and the default size does not help much there, but i'm not saying it does harm either. if everyone else wants that, then go for it. | 25-Nov-06 9:25 |
| 487 | Anton | Hmm... | 25-Nov-06 4:45 |
| 486 | Anton | I was thnking of having pdf-maker as an output format for bubble-doc. | 25-Nov-06 4:44 |
| 485 | Anton | Ah, but I don't want to do it if you don't think it's a good idea. | 25-Nov-06 4:42 |
| 484 | Gabriele | note, of course you are free to do these changes and distribute them. v1 is public domain actually :) (not even bsd) | 24-Nov-06 16:09 |
| 483 | Anton | I see, and I understand and accept your position regarding the "low-level-ness" of the dialect. Sorry for the confusion, but I left the line setting the default position commented so you could uncomment it *if* you already had a "current layout position" variable handy. I thought any position would be better than no position. | 24-Nov-06 8:39 |
| 482 | Gabriele | there's also to say, that the layout-pdf dialect is still meant to be rather low level. a human would write in QML or makedoc or some high level dialect, not layout-pdf; thus the defaults for image would be useless (even if a human was to write it, they'd only cover some 10-20% of the cases, since not all images have the same dpi, and 99% of the time you don't want the image at the bottom left corner of the page). | 24-Nov-06 8:01 |
| 481 | Gabriele | still, 0 0 does not seem a reasonable default for the position to me, unless you want the image to cover the whole page. anyway, "You could, however, easily add a small helper rule to accept 2 numbers or a pair": it's not so in v2 (because of evaluation), and I don't intend to do anything except necessary bug fixes for v1 :) | 24-Nov-06 7:58 |
| 480 | Anton | With the above patch, this:
layout-pdf [ [ image logo.gif ] ] shows the image with the size of 100x24 mm. When rendered by Adobe Reader at 100%, that appears about 3.5 times larger in each direction than view layout [ image logo.gif ] Actually, it would be better to multiply by the pixels/mm ratio. Let me have a look... | 24-Nov-06 4:15 |
| 479 | Anton | I agree the above code is more complicated. You could, however, easily add a small helper rule to accept 2 numbers or a pair. | 24-Nov-06 4:05 |
| 478 | Gabriele | the reason i don't accept pairs is consistency; since values are decimal, and pair is integer only, i don't allow them to avoid confusion and complicating the rules even more (in v2 this would be even more complicated because of evaluation) | 23-Nov-06 19:14 |
| 477 | Gabriele | image logo.gif would be at position 0 0 and 1 mm high, 1 mm wide (unless there's another transformation involved) | 23-Nov-06 19:12 |
| 476 | Anton | Sorry, defaults for what ? The above changes allow eg: layout-pdf [ [ image logo.gif ] ] layout-pdf [ [ image 20x150 200x96 logo.gif ] ] | 23-Nov-06 13:32 |
| 475 | Gabriele | so 0 0 1 1 are reasonable defaults? hmm. | 23-Nov-06 9:52 |
| 474 | Anton | Aha... images are not compressed. Two images of 1.34 MB made a 67MB pdf ... Onward pdf-maker-2 ... :) | 23-Nov-06 8:37 |
| 473 | Anton | (5 changed lines.) | 23-Nov-06 8:25 |
| 472 | Anton | | 'image ( push new gfx: none insert tail new/contents new: make default-space [] ) opt [opt 'at [copy val1 2 number! | set val1 pair!] (if pair? val1 [val1: reduce [val1/x val1/y]] new/translate: val1)] ; <-- now translation is optional, and can be a pair too opt [opt 'size [copy val1 2 number! | set val1 pair!] (if pair? val1 [val1: reduce [val1/x val1/y]] new/scale: val1)] ; <-- now scale is optional, and can be a pair too any [ 'rotated set val1 number! (new/rotate: val1) | 'skew [copy val1 2 number! | set val1 pair!] (if pair? val1 [val1: reduce [val1/x val1/y]] new/skew: val1) ; <-- now accepts a pair ] set val1 [image! | file! | word!] ( if word? val1 [val1: get val1] if file? val1 [val1: load val1] ;if none? new/translate [new/translate: [0 0]] ; <- default position (could set this to "current layout position") if none? new/scale [new/scale: reduce [val1/size/x val1/size/y]] ; <- default size insert insert tail used-images val2: join "Img" length? used-images val1 gfx-emit [to-refinement val2 'Do] new: pop gfx: none ) | 23-Nov-06 8:24 |
| 471 | Anton | Gabriele, I have patched pdf-maker.r 1.27.1 of 3-Aug-2006 to make the dialect a little easier with images. Starting at line 1051, the changed lines are commented: | 23-Nov-06 8:24 |
| 470 | Henrik | some day someone will write a PDF viewer for REBOL that will rival Preview.app for mac, so things will be good. :-) | 8-Oct-06 11:39 |
| 469 | Oldes | But maybe you are right. | 8-Oct-06 11:31 |
| 468 | Oldes | I know people who are able to send me PDF where is only one image (they are Mac users of course) | 8-Oct-06 11:31 |
| 467 | Henrik | so you shouldn't hate PDF, but the viewer :-) | 8-Oct-06 11:30 |
| 466 | Oldes | Of course, PDF is the main format for everything on Mac:-) | 8-Oct-06 11:30 |
| 465 | Henrik | oldes, depends on the viewer. I use PDF's under OSX all the time. :-) | 8-Oct-06 11:28 |
| 464 | Oldes | It must be related to acrobat as I have same problems with other PDF documents sometimes if I open them in Firefox - I must say that I don't like PDFs at all | 8-Oct-06 11:25 |
| 463 | james_nak | Maybe the acrobat driver wasn't running. In any case, nice work Gabriele. | 6-Oct-06 18:05 |
| 462 | Oldes | But it's working now, strange | 6-Oct-06 8:53 |
| 461 | Oldes | The link above just crashed my Firefox | 6-Oct-06 8:49 |
| 460 | Anton | Looks great. Good work. http://www.colellachiara.com/soft/PDFM2/test.pdf | 6-Oct-06 5:18 |
| 459 | Gabriele | ...done. last page of test.pdf. | 5-Oct-06 16:33 |
| 458 | Gabriele | :) it's uploading... | 5-Oct-06 16:32 |
| 457 | Anton | You want to show off your technology don't you ? :) | 5-Oct-06 16:24 |
| 456 | Gabriele | let me add one for you... | 5-Oct-06 16:23 |
| 455 | Anton | Ok. | 5-Oct-06 16:23 |
| 454 | Anton | .. but doesn't appear to be one. Maybe you could add it ? | 5-Oct-06 16:23 |
| 453 | Gabriele | it's not there, but the pdf-emitter for qml creates them :) | 5-Oct-06 16:22 |
| 452 | Anton | I'm looking for a definition-list example in the test document ... | 5-Oct-06 16:20 |
| 451 | Anton | Ah.. I have experienced this problem. That is a good improvement. | 5-Oct-06 16:19 |
| 450 | Gabriele | in the pdf maker, two words in the first column would not be broken, since shrinking a column with text that is already more that one line is better than shrinking a column with text which can fit in one line. | 5-Oct-06 16:17 |
| 449 | Gabriele | i.e. the first column is forced to be very small by the second column having long text | 5-Oct-06 16:16 |
| 448 | Gabriele | what you get in web browsers is that if you have two words in the first column, they are very likely to be broken into two lines | 5-Oct-06 16:16 |
| 447 | Gabriele | this means that the description is usually long, while the first column only has a word or two. | 5-Oct-06 16:15 |
| 446 | Gabriele | classic example: you are doing a definition list with a table, so you have a column with words and a column with the description. | 5-Oct-06 16:15 |
| 445 | Anton | I see your embedded image. Very nice. Can you explain briefly how the column width calculation is better ? | 5-Oct-06 15:04 |
| 444 | Gabriele | update: changes to tables, now can calculate the column widths automatically. (it does so *much* better than web browsers.) | 4-Oct-06 17:09 |
| 443 | Gabriele | hmm, rereading the spec, it may work just putting the jpg file there. i will try that, eventually. :) | 29-Sep-06 17:50 |
| 442 | Gabriele | pdf wants the dct data, not the whole jpg binary, afaik. the data in the jpg header go to the image object dictionary. | 29-Sep-06 17:44 |
| 441 | Oldes | (I mean embedding images into the PDF, to make it clear, the format is different of course) | 29-Sep-06 15:46 |
| 440 | Oldes | Is the PDF format so different? SWF and PDF are now in the same stable = Adobe | 29-Sep-06 15:43 |
| 439 | Oldes | I'm embedding JPGs into SWF files without problem, there is not required any special operation on the JPG's data to embedd. With the other formats I have to count pallete and use Rebol's compress (zlib) to embedd such an image (gif or png). It's not so fast, but it does what I need (and I don't mind if it takes a second more time to compile) | 29-Sep-06 15:42 |
| 438 | Gabriele | thanks oldes, i'll probably ask you more when i get to this :) | 27-Sep-06 17:19 |
| 437 | Oldes | And yes, Rebol's compress is some older version of zlib compression - I use Rebol's compress function to create compressed SWF files, but in some cases Rebol is not able to decompress zlib binaries (so I use the dll) | 27-Sep-06 14:02 |
| 436 | Oldes | But it's Rebol?pro version (using a dll) http://oldes.multimedia.cz/rebol/zlib_latest.rip | 27-Sep-06 14:00 |
| 435 | Anton | Oldes made a zlib compressor/decompressor. I found it in my cache: public/box.lebeda.ws/~hmm/rebol/zlib/latest/zlib.r but it's not there on the web, apparently. Try check for his latest website. | 27-Sep-06 5:31 |
| 434 | Gabriele | i think compress is from zlib | 26-Sep-06 16:21 |
| 433 | Henrik | maybe a compression group would be in order... | 26-Sep-06 16:16 |
| 432 | Maxim | I seem to remember someone building a wrapper around compress to cope with this issue... yes... but its sooo long ago... maybe it was something else. | 26-Sep-06 16:15 |
| 431 | Henrik | isn't the current compress, a gz compression lacking some headers? | 26-Sep-06 16:14 |
| 430 | Maxim | (and compress/TAR) | 26-Sep-06 16:12 |
| 429 | Maxim | yes! compress/RLA compress/ZIP compress/GZIP compress/JPEG compress/MP3 | 26-Sep-06 16:11 |
| 428 | Gabriele | i will eventually have a look at this... for now, i'm happy with them being uncompressed :) | 26-Sep-06 16:11 |
| 427 | Gabriele | also every image to jpg is not a good idea (users may not want that, if the image is not a photo but a drawing for eg) | 26-Sep-06 16:11 |
| 426 | Henrik | it would be nice if compress had more modes that are "strategically" made to be compatible with various types of binaries where such compressed data is embedded. | 26-Sep-06 16:10 |
| 425 | Maxim | (embed jpg file saved from rebol and converted to jpeg with image-magic) | 26-Sep-06 16:10 |
| 424 | Gabriele | max: sure but you still have to parse the resulting jpeg data | 26-Sep-06 16:10 |
| 423 | Maxim | you could use edgar's image-magic examples and use image magic if pro licence and image magic is found... its going to be Extremely fast. | 26-Sep-06 16:09 |
| 422 | Gabriele | but i guess i'm not so lucky that compress is compatible... | 26-Sep-06 16:09 |
| 421 | Gabriele | if compress does work, that could be applied to everything else too, so the resulting file would be surely smaller. | 26-Sep-06 16:09 |
| 420 | Gabriele | one possibilty would be: pass jpg file name, not image!; parse jpeg file for jpeg data; embed jpeg data in the pdf | 26-Sep-06 16:08 |
| 419 | Henrik | would take minutes to compress anyway... | 26-Sep-06 16:07 |
| 418 | Gabriele | but jpg is nothing i want to write in rebol ;) | 26-Sep-06 16:07 |
| 417 | Gabriele | well... run-length or similar should not be a big problem (will be slow, but maybe the result of compress does work after removing header) | 26-Sep-06 16:07 |
| 416 | Henrik | I guess compression is hard to do? | 26-Sep-06 16:06 |
| 415 | Gabriele | nope. that's why it's big | 26-Sep-06 16:06 |
| 414 | Henrik | is the image of you compressed in some way? | 26-Sep-06 16:05 |
| 413 | Gabriele | i should add something instead of that box... maybe i should convert something from draw. | 26-Sep-06 16:05 |
| 412 | Gabriele | yes. not great gfx i know, but shows that it works ;) | 26-Sep-06 16:04 |
| 411 | Henrik | "You can also "display" graphics:" and after that, there is a box. is this correct? very nice, by the way :-) | 26-Sep-06 16:03 |
| 410 | Gabriele | update: images; embedding gfx into text. (see last page of test.pdf) | 26-Sep-06 16:00 |
| 409 | Anton | Ah :) | 26-Sep-06 8:00 |
| 408 | Gabriele | circle: i didn't spend much time on it. it's done by just setting the margins of each line so that it looks like a circle. :) | 25-Sep-06 17:03 |
| 407 | Gabriele | the bugs were not visible in test.pdf, but they were in various qml documents. :) i will upload the new qml-ed very soon. | 25-Sep-06 17:02 |
| 406 | Anton | I didn't notice much different in test.pdf. Probably small differences there. I keep looking at that circle and wondering if the centre can be positioned so that there's as much text on the first row as the final row. | 25-Sep-06 15:28 |
| 405 | Gabriele | update: many bugfixes | 25-Sep-06 15:08 |
| 404 | Graham | Yes ... it is. But documentation seems lacking, and it appears to be deprecated by Adobe. | 24-Sep-06 23:33 |
| 403 | MichaelB | Isn't that one of the formats for Acrobat Forms ? There should be several types, like xfdf and the like .... but I'm not 100% sure. | 24-Sep-06 21:39 |
| 402 | Graham | Anyone know anything much about the FDF format? | 24-Sep-06 18:41 |
| 401 | Graham | Needs Ghostscript doesn't it? | 22-Sep-06 0:16 |
| 400 | ? | PDFCreator
Overview: PDFCreator is an application for converting documents into Portable Document Format (PDF) format on Microsoft Windows operating system. Once installed, it allows the user to select PDFCreator as their printer, allowing almost any application to print to PDF, PNG, JPEG, BMP, PCX, TIFF and EPS format. Besides being installed as a printer driver, PDFCreator can be associated with .ps files to manually convert Postscript to PDF format. | 21-Sep-06 21:46 |
| 399 | eFishAnt | Graham, thanks. | 21-Sep-06 20:28 |
| 398 | Graham | pdf2ps | 21-Sep-06 19:17 |
| 397 | eFishAnt | found http://www.pstoedit.net/pstoedit which can do vector graphics...maybe this will help...and some point would be cool to do these in REBOL. | 21-Sep-06 17:03 |
| 396 | eFishAnt | so I can load a .pdf and make a high res bitmap? | 21-Sep-06 16:58 |
| 395 | Alan | photoshop will strip out graphics files if thats what you need | 21-Sep-06 16:22 |
| 394 | eFishAnt | A way to convert content, especially graphic from .pdf to something useful. | 21-Sep-06 15:00 |
| 393 | eFishAnt | a quick scan here ... I do not see anything for taking a .pdf and converting it to something like an image or some markup. Does anyone know of something that converts a .pdf to generic postscript (like for GSView) or to convert to native REBOL format? Thanks. | 21-Sep-06 14:59 |
| 392 | Gabriele | you can just use any graphics for cells. for example QML can produce boxes with rounded corners and shadows. | 20-Sep-06 20:13 |
| 391 | Anton | Funny looking table borders ! :) | 20-Sep-06 15:33 |
| 390 | Anton | http://www.colellachiara.com/soft/PDFM2/test.pdf | 20-Sep-06 15:30 |
| 389 | Gabriele | see test.pdf | 19-Sep-06 16:07 |
| 388 | Gabriele | (cell decorations is a superset of table borders, cell background etc) | 19-Sep-06 16:07 |
| 387 | Gabriele | update: graphic commands, cell decorations | 19-Sep-06 16:05 |
| 386 | Gabriele | update: table options | 18-Sep-06 15:26 |
| 385 | Anton | Cool. Getting better. | 18-Sep-06 14:41 |
| 384 | Gabriele | i have tested table inside table cell, it works fine. (see test.pdf) | 18-Sep-06 11:39 |
| 383 | Gabriele | update: text colors, fixed table parsing bug | 18-Sep-06 11:38 |
| 382 | Gabriele | it's much lower level than MD or QML. It's a REBOL dialect, not a ML. | 18-Sep-06 8:31 |
| 381 | ? | Ah. What is it? I have not played with PDF Maker | 18-Sep-06 3:56 |
| 380 | Gabriele | reichart, i'm pretty sure he's using the pdf maker dialect directly. | 16-Sep-06 19:14 |
| 379 | ? | LOL, I meant as in HTML, MakeDoc, etc. | 16-Sep-06 17:11 |
| 378 | Anton | I like the cautious optimism :) Looking good. | 16-Sep-06 16:21 |
| 377 | Gabriele | this also means that you can have a table inside a table cell - not tested yet, but maybe it works. ;) | 16-Sep-06 13:53 |
| 376 | Gabriele | update: added embedded tables (i.e. tables between paragraphs) | 16-Sep-06 13:52 |
| 375 | Gabriele | http://www.colellachiara.com/soft/PDFM2 | 16-Sep-06 8:17 |
| 374 | Louis | Currently only English. But I'm needing to print Greek, Indonesian, and English mixed on the same page. Also, Hebrew, Indonesian, English on the same page. To be more specific, a line of Greek, then a line of Indonesian, then a line of English, then back to a line of Greek, and so on. | 16-Sep-06 6:14 |
| 373 | ? | Louis, what is your input lanaguge for PDFMaker? | 16-Sep-06 6:03 |
| 372 | Louis | For whatever it is worth, Gabriele, I use PDF-Maker regularly. It is core to some of my most important scripts. So, I very much appreciate your work. | 16-Sep-06 5:55 |
| 371 | Louis | Somehow I lost the link to the PDF-Maker test site. Would someone please post it. | 16-Sep-06 5:53 |
| 370 | Gabriele | (the table dialect is still very basic, just for testing. table layout seems to work well, uses the total-fit algorithm and should create optimal layouts in most usual cases. there are boundary cases where it can fail, but i hope we won't need to worry about them. check test.pdf for an example of a table.) | 15-Sep-06 15:41 |
| 369 | Gabriele | update: added preliminary table support. | 15-Sep-06 15:40 |
| 368 | ? | That was what I figured. | 11-Sep-06 21:40 |
| 367 | Gabriele | (you can do almost everything with TeX by using tricks, but you basically need to layout the table manually. it is not able to do that automatically - something that we need to do instead.) | 11-Sep-06 20:34 |
| 366 | Gabriele | About tables? TeX only handles very simple tables. Absolutely not enough to get QML tables there. | 11-Sep-06 20:33 |
| 365 | Geomol | Reichart, I'm still learning about TeX, but I'll guess, LaTeX to PDF take output from LaTeX (a TeX document) and convert it to the PDF format. To see output from LaTeX, you still need a TeX engine to view the document in the final form. Convert it to PDF, and you just need a PDF viewer. | 11-Sep-06 18:11 |
| 364 | ? | What do the current LaTeX to DPF programs do? | 11-Sep-06 15:53 |
| 363 | Anton | Cool, good luck. | 11-Sep-06 14:42 |
| 362 | Gabriele | ok, i will think more about the problem (still hope to find some kind of nice solution), and see what others think too. | 11-Sep-06 14:40 |
| 361 | Anton | (That's not to say people won't be looking for more complex interactions, but I think the simplest way solves most complaints the quickest.) | 11-Sep-06 14:40 |
| 360 | Gabriele | (in some cases it doesn't, because it would require too much time, but the user decides this, by setting the tolerance) | 11-Sep-06 14:40 |
| 359 | Anton | Yes, I think it will be the easiest and simplest solution. | 11-Sep-06 14:39 |
| 358 | Gabriele | the algorithm produces the layout with the least total demerits. | 11-Sep-06 14:39 |
| 357 | Anton | (Ok, so the algorithm looks for the lowest penalties first.) | 11-Sep-06 14:38 |
| 356 | Gabriele | which is one possible solution. | 11-Sep-06 14:38 |
| 355 | Gabriele | basically you're saying: either you allow vertical alignment, or cell splitting. | 11-Sep-06 14:38 |
| 354 | Gabriele | a paragraph of two lines already has a big penalty for being split. so generally it is kept together. | 11-Sep-06 14:37 |
| 353 | Anton | I think that might be the simple answer, actually. It is only when the software makes a blunder with intelligent splitting that it becomes a problem. If the user can force a row to always remain together that would solve most of those problems. | 11-Sep-06 14:37 |
| 352 | Gabriele | that is possible using penalties. | 11-Sep-06 14:37 |
| 351 | Anton | (or certain rows) | 11-Sep-06 14:35 |
| 350 | Anton | Perhaps certain cells can be set to "never split" ? | 11-Sep-06 14:35 |
| 349 | Anton | That's not a nice problem. :-( I think if the user has some control of the variables (eg. maybe threshold), then they can influence what happens there. | 11-Sep-06 14:34 |
| 348 | Anton | As soon as you said that, I thought of a default threshold cell size which decides between splitting and moving to next page. And then this can be overridden by the user, who can move the threshold between 0% and 100%, 0% indicating always split, and 100% indicating always move. | 11-Sep-06 14:33 |
| 347 | Gabriele | basically i must find all possible breakpoints in each row. the problem is what to do with vertical alignment: if you have a cell that should be aligned in the middle, and there's a bigger cell that gets split, how does the smaller one get aligned? | 11-Sep-06 14:32 |
| 346 | Gabriele | the total fit algorithm can do most of this. the problem are the "minor" details like vertical alignment. | 11-Sep-06 14:31 |
| 345 | Gabriele | yes it is. :) | 11-Sep-06 14:30 |
| 344 | Gabriele | notice that tables can be used for many things, for example to layout a numbered list, with the number in the first cell and the text in the second | 11-Sep-06 14:30 |
| 343 | Anton | How to control all these variables !!! It's a big job, isn't it ? | 11-Sep-06 14:30 |
| 342 | Gabriele | if it's half a page it's probably much better to split it in two | 11-Sep-06 14:30 |
| 341 | Gabriele | that is a matter of how big it is the row. | 11-Sep-06 14:29 |
| 340 | Anton | So - split is your preferred method over cut, but what about the option to move the entire row to the next page if it doesn't quite fit on this one ? | 11-Sep-06 14:28 |
| 339 | Gabriele | cut would not cut it at a random place. the difference is borders and margins (and padding) | 11-Sep-06 14:26 |
| 338 | Anton | Really ? So it's easier to do split ? | 11-Sep-06 14:25 |
| 337 | Anton | What's the purpose of split ? Also, cut and split - it's difficult to distinguish the difference. Need better words. | 11-Sep-06 14:25 |
| 336 | Gabriele | however, there is a race condition with cut. so i'm going to always do split. | 11-Sep-06 14:24 |
| 335 | Gabriele | split would instead create two cells from the original one. | 11-Sep-06 14:23 |
| 334 | Anton | I think it's safer to keep each row together with itself by default. | 11-Sep-06 14:23 |
| 333 | Gabriele | cut would work like the cell was just cut with scissors. | 11-Sep-06 14:23 |
| 332 | Gabriele | i was thinking initially to allow two modes of splitting cells: cut and split. | 11-Sep-06 14:23 |
| 331 | Anton | Yes, but I think it's connected because it allows one to be more aware that the cell might have been split. | 11-Sep-06 14:22 |
| 330 | Gabriele | a data table like the one you're thinking about most likely has one line of text for each row. that would be split at row boundaries only. | 11-Sep-06 14:22 |
| 329 | Gabriele | that's a different issue. | 11-Sep-06 14:21 |
| 328 | Anton | ? | 11-Sep-06 14:20 |
| 327 | Anton | Would you indicate that the table is split for a page break (by not drawing the bottom line of the table on the first page, and not drawing the top line on the second page etc.) | 11-Sep-06 14:20 |
| 326 | Anton | Mmm.... that depends on the whim of the user. Splitting some types of data might be misleading. | 11-Sep-06 14:19 |
| 325 | Gabriele | how would you expect vertical alignment to be handled when a cell gets split into two for page breaking? | 11-Sep-06 14:17 |
| 324 | Anton | I think that could be useful. As tables get longer (and need to be broken across pages) it becomes more probable that it has data with a very wide range of widths. In that case, reproportioning the table for each page makes sense. But perhaps when crowding between cells occurs because of very wide entries, simply wrapping text within cells would allow the column width to remain the same for the whole table. On the whole, I would prefer to have consistent column widths, but there might be cases where that's really annoying. I would probably put that as a lower priority feature for now. | 11-Sep-06 13:48 |
| 323 | Graham | Nope. | 11-Sep-06 9:35 |
| 322 | Gabriele | this would also mean that the table's columns need to have a different width across pages. ie column 1 in page 1 has a different width from column 1 in page 2. | 11-Sep-06 9:31 |
| 321 | Gabriele | does anyone think there are good reasons to support variable widths when breaking a table between pages? | 11-Sep-06 9:30 |
| 320 | Anton | Just tabs are a quick and handy alternative to setting up a table. | 7-Sep-06 11:36 |
| 319 | Anton | Mmm.. I can't think of any particular need for tabs off the top of my head, but I remember a situation a long time ago where I was editing text, tabs were not implemented and I missed them. I'm sorry I can't be more specific than that at the moment. | 7-Sep-06 11:35 |
| 318 | Gabriele | that is a fixed space, not a tab. | 7-Sep-06 10:54 |
| 317 | Anton | Excuse me if I sound a bit disconnected. I do not clearly envisage yet how it should be used. | 6-Sep-06 15:12 |
| 316 | Anton | How did you implement the leading indent at the beginning of paragraphs ? Is that not in reality a kind of tab ? | 6-Sep-06 15:06 |
| 315 | Gabriele | otherwise, i'll end up with an infinite list of things to add. | 6-Sep-06 14:55 |
| 314 | Gabriele | anton, if you can convince me they are needed (i.e. there are things that are useful to do that can't be done without them) :) | 6-Sep-06 14:55 |
| 313 | yeksoon | I have not read through the whole thread. But, there is mention of space and page break. What is the issue now? Is it because of 'unexpected' page break? | 6-Sep-06 14:10 |
| 312 | Anton | They're good because they're needed aren't they ? ;-) | 6-Sep-06 10:44 |
| 311 | Gabriele | i know that tabs are good - i wonder if they are needed. | 6-Sep-06 10:25 |
| 310 | Gabriele | detab the script source first ;) | 6-Sep-06 10:24 |
| 309 | Anton | I'd really like to do the docs, but I'm so overloaded. | 6-Sep-06 10:07 |
| 308 | Graham | tabs are good. | 6-Sep-06 10:07 |
| 307 | Anton | I think tabs will be good when importing text from a script's console output, for instance. | 6-Sep-06 10:05 |
| 306 | Gabriele | btw, new update fixing a bug | 6-Sep-06 10:00 |
| 305 | Gabriele | "some other text" will start at the next tab position (30 mm from the margin, 60 mm from the margin etc, depending on where "some text" ends out) | 6-Sep-06 10:00 |
| 304 | Gabriele | "some text" tab "some other text" | 6-Sep-06 9:59 |
| 303 | Gabriele | eg you set tabs to [30 60 90] then when you write: | 6-Sep-06 9:59 |
| 302 | Graham | can you explain further on tabs? | 6-Sep-06 8:59 |
| 301 | Gabriele | i think that all cases where this could be useful can be solved with tables. | 6-Sep-06 8:48 |
| 300 | Gabriele | anyway - i have a question. do you think that it would be useful to have tabs, as fixed positions inside lines to go to with a tab command in the middle of a paragraph? | 6-Sep-06 8:48 |
| 299 | Gabriele | so... noone willing to write the user docs? | 6-Sep-06 8:47 |
| 298 | Gabriele | not on my list. maybe in the future. | 5-Sep-06 21:50 |
| 297 | Graham | Any chance of being able to create pdf forms ? | 5-Sep-06 19:44 |
| 296 | Henrik | OTOH it would be highly practical with custom fonts, such as OCR fonts for invoices. also tables are very useful. | 5-Sep-06 14:44 |
| 295 | Anton | An invoice usually wouldn't be more than one or two pages ! :) | 5-Sep-06 14:15 |
| 294 | Gabriele | yes... if you're typesetting a book, you'll want the quality; if you're typesetting an invoice, you won't care about justification with the total-fit algorithm (although, the total-fit algorithm could still help to break pages when there are tables) | 5-Sep-06 8:54 |
| 293 | Anton | So an application would operate in simple" mode most of the time, but final render would use the expensive algorithm that requires n passes. | 5-Sep-06 5:16 |
| 292 | Anton | That's true.... | 5-Sep-06 5:14 |
| 291 | Gabriele | my plan is to eventually add a "simple" text mode for use when you care for speed instead of quality. | 4-Sep-06 8:06 |
| 290 | Gabriele | but then you're no more getting an optimal solution. :) | 4-Sep-06 8:05 |
| 289 | Anton | How about this for an idea: you allocate space for each page reference as if it's the largest likely page, eg 9999. As each page reference is resolved, you get some space back, but that reclaimed space becomes "dead" whitespace (probably placed at the end of the page, or distributed amongst other whitespace), and it does not cause an earlier page-break. So the page reference resolution will not affect the pagination. | 4-Sep-06 5:43 |
| 288 | Gabriele | at worst we'll do like LaTeX and use n passes to resolve page number references. | 3-Sep-06 21:32 |
| 287 | Gabriele | graham: for footers with the current chapter/section etc. i'm going to do the same as TeX (should be rather easy to implement). i have to think how to resolve them and page numbers into text though, but in simple cases it's quite easy to do (the more general case will need some thinking) | 3-Sep-06 21:31 |
| 286 | Gabriele | oldes: i have an utf8 parser too. however it's not that easy because the PDF format does not support unicode directly. you have to create custom fonts. i have to study this in detail, but i noticed that OpenOffice generates a font for each set of 256 characters. | 3-Sep-06 21:26 |
| 285 | Gabriele | luis: no, rebol does not need unicode support. | 3-Sep-06 21:24 |
| 284 | Oldes | With the utf-8 converter it must be enough as it's enough to make SWF files in my Rebol/Flash dialect | 3-Sep-06 14:30 |
| 283 | Oldes | Gabriele can use my script for unicode conversions: http://box.lebeda.ws/~hmm/rebol/projects/ucs2/latest/ucs2.r | 3-Sep-06 14:27 |
| 282 | Louis | I am extremely interested in this project. Thank you Gabriele for all the work and expertise going into this. It looks great! | 3-Sep-06 14:13 |
| 281 | Louis | Does REBOL have to support unicode before PDF-Maker can support unicode? | 3-Sep-06 14:10 |
| 280 | Anton | Very cool looking now. | 3-Sep-06 11:51 |
| 279 | Graham | I mean, page numbering with footers etc... | 3-Sep-06 10:48 |
| 278 | Graham | What about pagination? | 3-Sep-06 10:47 |
| 277 | Graham | Looks very good. | 3-Sep-06 10:47 |
| 276 | Gabriele | new update - paragraph margins; as a side effect this now allows drop caps and paragraph shapes (check out the circle paragraph in the second page). | 3-Sep-06 9:48 |
| 275 | Gabriele | louis: no eta at this point, but again, hopefully very soon. | 3-Sep-06 9:47 |
| 274 | Gabriele | henrik: yes, but can't say when. (hopefully very soon) | 3-Sep-06 9:46 |
| 273 | Louis | Do you think it will be very long before you implement unicode support? Unicode support seems to be holding up most of what I need to do at present. | 3-Sep-06 0:19 |
| 272 | Henrik | will there be a method to use custom fonts? | 2-Sep-06 21:42 |
| 271 | Gabriele | not yet. that will be possible when i implement unicode support (and you'll need a font with all the chars you want). | 2-Sep-06 21:01 |
| 270 | Louis | Can Greek and Roman fonts be mixed? | 2-Sep-06 19:00 |
| 269 | Gabriele | note, that the result when using emergency breaks is not optimal. they are only used to allow break-lines to produce a result in all cases. increasing the tolerance is the only way to get optimal results. | 2-Sep-06 16:19 |
| 268 | Gabriele | after many attempts, i decided to think about how the algorithm was really supposed to work, so found a good way to implement emergency breaks... now i finally fixed all bugs with it and it is working fine. | 2-Sep-06 16:18 |
| 267 | Gabriele | however, i underestimated the problem, since that was a source of infinite bugs... i wasn't doing it right. | 2-Sep-06 16:17 |
| 266 | Gabriele | so, i changed break-lines so that it never failed, but could insert emergency breaks if it was impossible to break the para with the given tolerance. | 2-Sep-06 16:17 |
| 265 | Gabriele | initially i was first attempting to break lines with the normal tolerance, then increasing it if that failed. the problem with this approach is that the time needed by break-lines grows quickly with the tolerance; if we want it to never fail, we need to give it an infinite tolerance, which means considering all possible breaks, which takes forever. | 2-Sep-06 16:16 |
| 264 | Gabriele | so, contrary to TeX, it should produce underfull boxes, like any word processor would do. | 2-Sep-06 16:14 |
| 263 | Gabriele | pdf maker can't do this, because manual intervention is in general not desirable. (i.e. an app that uses the pdf maker to produce invoices should not expect the user to manually fix the layout if there are problems) | 2-Sep-06 16:13 |
| 262 | Gabriele | what the problem was with break-lines: as some of you probably know, when TeX cannot break a paragraph with a given stretch tolerance, it produces overfull boxes, assuming that in such a case manual intervention is desirable. | 2-Sep-06 16:12 |
| 261 | Gabriele | new update - finally fixed break-lines (more on this below), added widow/orphan penalties and setting of parameters like tolerance, interline glue and looseness (the latter allows increasing or decreasing the number of lines of a paragraph). | 2-Sep-06 16:11 |
| 260 | Robert | Gab, this really looks great!! Getting the same output like TeX but without this chaotic installation and config stuff is very cute... | 2-Sep-06 9:46 |
| 259 | Gabriele | the current bug (which i'm going to fix now) is the "Introduction" not being hypenated in the small column in page 4. | 2-Sep-06 8:19 |
| 258 | Gabriele | first page you mean? it is intended, the textbox does not have enough space for all the text. | 2-Sep-06 8:18 |
| 257 | Anton | I see the headers. I notice at the end of the second page, the final hyphenated word "improve-" does not continue on the next page. | 1-Sep-06 17:09 |
| 256 | Gabriele | see test.pdf for an example of typesetting a long text into columns, with headers etc. (doesn't break just after a header and things like this) | 1-Sep-06 16:41 |