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

[Matt Gushee]

On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 4:25 AM, Peter Bex <address@hidden> wrote:

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.

Yes, I agree--on both the importance and the difficulty of these features. It would be silly to argue over whether this or font embedding is more important. If I personally work on the library, I will start with fonts, partly because font embedding is conceptually simple, partly because it is more important for certain languages I am interested in, such as Japanese. In fact, there is an issue with typesetting Japanese proper names, which may seem trivial to most Westerners but is important to Japanese people, that may well require embedding font subsets. And then there are other languages like Arabic and Devanagari, where the *really* difficult typesetting problems come in ... or not. I think CJKV support would be great, but maybe some languages can be left up to Microsoft and the TeX community ;-)

 

 The only free software PDF
generating library that's capable of that which I've found is Reportlab
in Python, with their "Platypus" engine.

Yes ... I might take a look at that. I know Python pretty well, though it's been a few years since I've done any serious work in it.

 

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.

I like that idea. I have no particular love for the pdf egg as it is, or its Common Lisp ancestor ... just wanted something to generate PDF files in Chicken. And I've had a look at the fps docs ... they give the impression of a very well-thought-out library.

--

Matt Gushee