RE: [iText-questions] Re-Post: Line-Screen

[Leonard Rosenthol]

At 03:16 PM 3/1/2004, Bill Ensley wrote:

I have been following the iText mailing list for some time and it seems
that the iText team is unaware of the other uses for PDF files.
 

        I don't think that is true - but what is true is that neither Bruno nor Paulo are "print focused" individuals.  They both come from a web/screen background, as do most of the other users of iText - so that's where the features have been focused.

PDF for Press is a totally different avenue that PDF for web or distribution.

        To a certain extent, that's true.  Paulo and I have talked about things like PDF/X support - but that's not what most users want out of iText, so he (correctly) focuses on their needs.

        It's a catch-22...

Adobe has made many enhancements to the specification for the Printing Industry.

        True, and the core ones are in iText - but not (what I would consider) esoteric ones, such as halftoning.  Hell, even Adobe's own PDFLibrary doesn't offer high level APIs for that - you need to use the low level calls, just as you would with iText.

Right now, I must export all of my iText PDFs to eps files and import those
EPS's into a program that lets me add a default Line-Screen (Halftone) so that
I can control how the output looks.
 

        You might want to consider using a tool such as PitStop or the like so as to keep things in native PDF...

Adding the functionality to iText to set the default Halftone information
would be a great enhancement.
 

        Sure.  And it wouldn't be extremely hard to add either....

        Just read the PDFRef for what the dictionaries look like and where they go in the PDF, then build up some function that make them using the low level calls...

        Also, you'd be VERY WELL served reading existing PDFs for example dicts...


Leonard

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Leonard Rosenthol                            <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

Chief Technical Officer                      <http://www.pdfsages.com>

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