Dominik Seichter wrote back really fast:
[snip lots of really useful explanation - thanks!]
> PdfElements do not work at the moment (apart from images which work as far as
> I know). The only reason that they do not work is that appropriate
> constructors are missing for PdfStreamedDocument. A common base class should
> fix this problem. As all PdfElements operate directly on PdfObjects there
> should be no technical reasons why they should not work on
> PdfStreamedDocuments. I added support for PdfFields together with
> PdfStreamedDocuments a minute ago, hope this is helpful to you.
Wow, that was fast. I was just at the "vaguely pondering how to tackle
this" stage!
I do expect that PdfFields with streamed documents will be useful. Right
now I'm still at the extreme basics (since I got hung up for a while
trying to figure out how I could support using either in-memory or
streamed docs for testing & QA purposes) but eventually that'll come up
since Scribus does use PDF fields.
> Well this is going to become a major change. What do you think: Fix it now
> and
> include it into the 0.5 release or do a release now and fix it afterwards.
I'd be inclined to push 0.5 out then make the change. 0.5 is very usable
in other ways and is IMO at a reasonable milestone stage at the moment.
One must draw the line somewhere, otherwise it goes on forever and
people see ever-older and cruftier code as the "current" version. That
said, I do think we might want to stress for 0.5 that:
- This is a development milestone not a production release; and
- You should consider bundling podofo in your app (maybe using
svn:externals) and using snapshots of svn trunk, since we
fix and improve things all the time. Use snapshots since
we break things too (both with bugs and by intentionally
breaking API compat).
> As you are porting to Scribus right now, I leave this up to your decision. In
> my opinion the fixed PdfDocument issue, and the fixed memory issues would
> make up a nice 0.6 release.
I'm working on a PoDoFo based PDF exporter for Scribus mostly as an
experiment at this stage. It is unlikely to see the light of day (as
opposed to monitor-lit rooms full of pimply geeks) in its current form.
The Scribus PDF exporter is very full featured, with encryption support,
fields, ICC profiles for solid colours and for images, and lots more.
The main things it _can't_ do are PDF-in-PDF embedding (it rasterises
input PDFs using GhostScript and embeds raster data) and true font
subsetting.
That means that there's a very long way to go before a PoDoFo based
exporter for Scribus would be realistic for public use even if PoDoFo
already did everything Scribus needs (which it doesn't - especially
encryption). However, it'll be a VERY useful test platform, it should be
very informative regarding what in PoDoFo is good and what needs to
improve, and it'll do some things (like PDF-in-PDF embedding and
imposition) that the old Scribus exporter does not do.
As such, I'll be depending on PoDoFo svn anyway, not 0.5.0, and a
release won't much affect that work. That doesn't make a release any
less useful, though.
> But getting Scribus to use PoDoFo would be the killer-app for PoDoFo. So I
> will support you in any way while doing the port.
Wow, I'm glad you're so enthusiastic. In honestly, since I understand
some parts of podofo quite well now (like the core object/variant
stuff), much of it I'm still not that familar with. As such, sometimes
I'm sure I'd benefit from some help, even if it's just explanation or
suggestions. So thanks!
My first goal is to make the Scribus PDF exporter good enough to export
simple documents and to do basic imposition with input PDF files.
That'll provide some functonality that'll be useful in the real world
and lots of room for improvement and testing.
--
Craig Ringer
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