Re: [Chicken-users] [PATCH] PDF egg

[Christian Kellermann]

* Peter Bex <address@hidden> [121216 12:28]:
> On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 07:38:37PM -0700, Matt Gushee wrote:
> > Hi, Andy (and anyone interested in PDF generation)--
> > 
> > What *I* would like to see is a PDF lib that graphic designers will
> > like--and font embedding is a key part of that.
> 
> +1.  Personally, I think the killer feature of a good PDF generating
> library is the ability to do text flow and page layout.  I've been told
> that this is very hard to do right, though.  The only free software PDF
> generating library that's capable of that which I've found is Reportlab
> in Python, with their "Platypus" engine.
> 
> Finally, I think the fps egg is the more Schemely way to do PDF
> generation.  The pdf egg has a heavy imperative style while fps has
> a functional design and has a SICP picture language flavor to it.
> AFAIK Christian got started on a cairo backend for fps (which would
> allow it to write to things other than PS like PDF, PNG, SVG etc),
> but this hasn't been merged into the main trunk, I think.

This is correct. It is mostly working but a few crucial postscript
operations aren't translated correctly. This work in progress is
available in fps's cairo-backend branch in the svn egg repository.
If anyone wants to pick it up and continue hacking on it I'd be
glad to help. At the moment I am a bit clueless how to continue
there. (If someone finds a clever way to implement the arc command
then we would be almost there).

You can see the glory details and failures when running the test
case from fps.

I guess all it needs is a quiet moment with a whiteboard, but I
don't have the former while being with the latter...

Sorry for leaving it in this sorry state...

HTH,

Christian

-- 
In the world, there is nothing more submissive and weak than
water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong, nothing can
surpass it. --- Lao Tzu