On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 2:21 PM, chasd <chasd(a)silveroaks.com> wrote:
> *Tools used*:
>
> • gnome-games.i386 1:2.22.1.1-5.fc9
> • cups-pdf.i386 2.4.7-1.fc9
> • cairo.i386 1.6.4-1.fc9
> • evince.i386 2.22.1.1-1.fc9
> • AdobeReader_enu.i486 8.1.2-1
> • inkscape.i386 0.46-2.fc9
> • selinux-policy.noarch 3.3.1-55.fc9 (this will make sense later)
From your tools list, it would be better to create them with InkScape to
begin with, and bypass PDF.
A PDF is not considered an editable format, even though there are tools that
allow it.
Editing PDFs gets messy quickly.
Thanks for the feedback.
Well ... there are times when all you have is a PDF as the source
material to work from. So it is certainly nice to have the refined
tools to dig into the contents and modify things. But as I am trying
to illustrate with this simple example, the PDF generation that is
available to all apps that can print has some issues also.
There is also a bit of a correction. I mistakenly thought that
gnome-print uses cairo as a backend to generate PDFs. From what I
understand now, it does it all itself internally so blame or praise in
my test was falsely placed on cairo and should be on gnome-print. I
guess I have to read more about how all the pieces fit together ...
This is configurable in /etc/cups/cups-pdf.conf
There are several options there which could solve the issues of where the
file is written, the user that writes it ( not sure about context ), and the
filename.
Thanks ... I'll take a look.
> • Imports incorrectly in Inkscape
InkScape just got PDF editing support, it isn't going to be as good as Adobe
Acrobat.
No doubt. I found that Inkscape does an excellent job as a first
iteration though and was hoping to point out some places it doesn't. I
have a personal project underway that is taking PDFs and adding
editable PDF form fields on top. I have found that using Inkscape to
convert the PDF pages to SVGs and import those into Scribus where I
can add the form fields and some simple javascript gives OK results.
The SVG font translation into Scribus 1.3.4 is not so stellar though.
I am hoping that 1.3.5 is better.
> • multiple of binary streams when viewed in text editor
A valid PDF can be binary encoded. You may not want that, but it is valid to
the specs.
Also note that a valid PDF can have edits appended to the end of the file
that over-ride something in the body, and there is a checksum involved so a
parser knows it got all the data, you can't just "cat foo >> bar.pdf"
and
have it work. A PDF may look like a simple ASCII-based format ( sometimes
anyway ), but it much more complicated than that.
Doing the overlay/substitution thing is more appropriate in many
situations but not all. Xournal does this quite nicely with its PDF
Annotation functionality. I wish I could do this also with Scribus in
my project described above as I am simply adding new content but the
importing of PDFs in Scribus is .... marginal.
However, you are always increasing the file size this way and
increasing the rendering time.
> Printing with Ideal Fictional Dream PDF Printer:
Print to SVG or the PDF-Mars format instead.
<
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/mars/>
Mars uses XML as the file format for PDF instead of the traditional PDF
gorp. The Mars file format uses the "zip-it-up" ODT format, and has
everything described as XML referencing each page as an SVG. Although there
are few Mars tools available right now ;)
That would be the problem. Is there a package in the Fedora distro
that will enable a "Print to SVG" option?
/Mike