At 10:51 AM +0100 5/2/02, Paulo Soares wrote:
> > 1) Why the are two different types of low level PDF objects?
>> PRObject vs. PDFObject, etc.
>>
> The original objects (PdfObject) where designed to output PDF and as
>such contain additional information that cannot be extracted from the read
>pdf. The case of PdfString/PRString is paradigmatic. A PdfString contains a
>Unicode string and an encoding. When this object is output to the pdf the
>string is converted to a byte array depending on the encoding. The PRString
>contains only a byte array disguised as a string that when output to the pdf
>is only converted with direct byte casting. It's impossible to know what was
>the original encoding. PdfStream contains the entire stream and PRStream
>contains pointers to the file to save memory space. At the time this was
>what I thought was the straightforward way to do things, maybe something can
>be merged and changed to have an unified approach.
And it looks like there is a simple/transparent conversion
between the two using the getPdfObject method of PdfReader. As such,
that's fine since as I improve/enhance the pdfReader, I'll keep
working with the PR objects and just make sure to convert them to the
PdfObjects on their back to the caller.
> > 2) Why are both these sets of objects private to their package,
>> thereby disallowing "low level" access to applications?
>>
> This was essentially to protect the user from doing wrong things.
>The structure of iText also doesn't allow to generate an arbitrary document
>like PJ so it wasn't very important to expose the classes.
Right. But that's exactly what I am trying to do - give
iText capabilities ala PJ. As such, I now need those PdfObjects
exposed...
> For me they can all be public. I'm preparing a new release with
>shading patterns and I'll make those classes public. I'll also see if some
>of the PRObject can be eliminated and merged with the PdfObject.
>
Let's leave the two sets of classes, and just publicly expose
the PdfObjects. I think that's a better approach for now.
Can't wait to see shading patterns! How many of the
different types did you do? I found that the simple linear and
radial gradients were pretty easy to implement - but the more complex
ones just required too many programmatic values to be viable.
Leonard
--
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Leonard Rosenthol <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Chief Technical Officer <http://www.pdfsages.com>
PDF Sages, Inc. 215-629-3700 (voice)
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