[pdf-devel] First post to GNU PDF list..

[Russell N Hyer]

Hello,

I just wanted to say 'hi' to the people on this list. It's interesting
that you seem to be developing a PDF program. I say that from the
experience of having spent some years now thinking about exactly that
problem. In this time, between working and learning about other
systems, I have come upon several interesting things, which you may or
may not have come across before.

Firstly, I believe that PDFs should be minimal (or MINIM in my
syntax). Now, of course, this seems slightly obvious to many people,
but what I mean is that PDFs exist in an interpreted environment, and
because most of the time we are talking about using standard English
(or USian) fonts - then we can simply inherit from the OS or the
interpreter. (Actually, this behaviour is exactly the one that I make
use of - when writing my own PDFs (which can be interpreted by Adobe
Acrobat)).

Obviously, I would like to contribute to this project if I can be of
help in any way.

In the meantime - please take a little look at RIFFS.PDF which is a
MINIM PDF, which inherits the font without requiring that to be dumped
into the file itself, and which also contains a base64 stream at the
end of the file which (in full recursiveness) is a Smalltalk script
for reading base64 if it is placed in this part of the file [1]. The
idea behind such data streams is that they might be able to make
documentation of systems easier - as the code relating to that
particular documented function can also be placed inside the file.

__Files or Objects - what is the *proper* way to view a PDF?__
Now, after playing around with the concept for a while, I started
thinking about different transforms one *should* be able to perform on
a PDF. They involve, for example, seeing all filesystems as just as
pretend as each other, and that one ought therefore be able to `mount'
a PDF. Such filesystem access would be useful from the perspective of
people with, say, a specific piece of data, maybe a paragraph in a
letter that they're quoting, to be able to quote that adequately using
only a number of simple steps. Presenting to the user as a filesystem,
we could then use our standard tools to manipulate the document for
such editing tasks. (Well, I need to learn more programming to make
them effective, so maybe you might make them first. Anyway, that's my
$0.02).

Happy Hacking
Russell

[1] "...iEgIQ0=
startxref
1599
%%EOF" - that is just before the startxref command (because here we
are not forced to put the startxref in any specific place, only that
it should be there).

Interestingly Adobe Acrobat have started (recently) using a similar
feature which also enables you to have document attachments!
-- 
Diploma: English Law with German
University of Kent

RIFFS.PDF
Description: Adobe PDF document