Sargrad, Dave wrote:
> Yay, Yay, Yay! 
> 
> I finally have what seems like a clean podofo build/link/execute.
> Instead of using the pre-built freetype I built my own.
> 
> The key to this build was the "inconsistent dll linkage" warnings that
> were visible in the freetype build.
> 
> I searched around the freetype code for a bit, and decided to apply the
> following precompiler directive: FREETYPE2_STATIC
> 
> This eliminated the FREETYPE2 warnings, and as well it eliminated the
> podofo linker failures. 

Glad to hear it. A stock Freetype build works just fine here, but I 
didn't build the DLL, only the static library that's the default if you 
change nothing.

> Now for the real fun of trying to understand what podofo is all about.
> My initial goal with PDF handling will be to develop a renderer within
> the graphics environment that we are using to develop our application
> suite (Ogre3D).

It is important that I stress that PoDoFo is *NOT* a PDF renderer, just 
like the documentation and FAQ also say. It is not even close to being 
useful as a PDF renderer. It is not designed for use as a traditional 
PDF renderer, though one could be implemented on top of PoDoFo . To do 
so , the renderer would have to implement its own content stream 
parsing, graphics model, etc. There is *NO* way to ask PoDoFo "render 
this page to an image" ; it just can't do it.

PoDoFo is very handy for its job - low level PDF manipulation (parsing, 
editing, write-out, etc) and writing PDF with huge data streams. It's 
less good for a general PDF output library because you currently have to 
do a lot of the low level stuff yourself when creating content streams. 
For rendering PDF it doesn't even go so far as having a built-in content 
stream parser.

If what you meant was that you needed to extract data from a PDF and 
render that, PoDoFo is more likely to be useful. For straight out "draw 
this PDF page / region to a texture/image" work, though, you almost 
certainly want libpoppler or another dedicated render library.

Nothing stops libpoppler or a similar library being used alongside 
PoDoFo either. You face a memory and performance cost, of course, but 
there might be circumstances where it's worth it.

It'd be very cool to be able to have libpoppler render PDF out of PoDoFo 
in-memory data structures (think real-time on-screen PDF editing, easy 
thumbnail generation, etc) but nobody's come even close to tackling that 
yet.
--
Craig Ringer

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