World: r3wp

note, that the result when using emergency breaks is not optimal. 
they are only used to allow break-lines to produce a result in all 
cases. increasing the tolerance is the only way to get optimal results.

Can Greek and Roman fonts be mixed?

not yet. that will be possible when i implement unicode support (and 
you'll need a font with all the chars you want).

will there be a method to use custom fonts?

Do you think it will be very long before you implement unicode support? 
Unicode support seems to be holding up most of what I need to do 
at present.

henrik: yes, but can't say when. (hopefully very soon)

louis: no eta at this point, but again, hopefully very soon.

new update - paragraph margins; as a side effect this now allows 
drop caps and paragraph shapes (check out the circle paragraph in 
the second page).

Looks very good.

What about pagination?

I mean, page numbering with footers etc...

Very cool looking now.

Does REBOL have to support unicode before PDF-Maker can support unicode?

I am extremely interested in this project. Thank you Gabriele for 
all the work and expertise going into this. It looks great!

Gabriele can use my script for unicode conversions: http://box.lebeda.ws/~hmm/rebol/projects/ucs2/latest/ucs2.r

With the utf-8 converter it must be enough as it's enough to make 
SWF files in my Rebol/Flash dialect

luis: no, rebol does not need unicode support.

oldes: i have an utf8 parser too. however it's not that easy because 
the PDF format does not support unicode directly. you have to create 
custom fonts. i have to study this in detail, but i noticed that 
OpenOffice generates a font for each set of 256 characters.

graham: for footers with the current chapter/section etc. i'm going 
to do the same as TeX (should be rather easy to implement). i have 
to think how to resolve them and page numbers into text though, but 
in simple cases it's quite easy to do (the more general case will 
need some thinking)

at worst we'll do like LaTeX and use n passes to resolve page number 
references.

How about this for an idea: you allocate space for each page reference 
as if it's the largest likely page, eg 9999. As each page reference 
is resolved, you get some space back, but that reclaimed space becomes 
"dead" whitespace (probably placed at the end of the page, or distributed 
amongst other whitespace), and it does not cause an earlier  page-break. 
So the page reference resolution will not affect the pagination.

but then you're no more getting an optimal solution. :)

my plan is to eventually add a "simple" text mode for use when you 
care for speed instead of quality.

That's true....

So an application would operate in simple" mode most of the time, 
but final render would use the expensive algorithm that requires 
n passes.

yes... if you're typesetting a book, you'll want the quality; if 
you're typesetting an invoice, you won't care about justification 
with the total-fit algorithm (although, the total-fit algorithm could 
still help to break pages when there are tables)

An invoice usually wouldn't be more than one or two pages ! :)

OTOH it would be highly practical with custom fonts, such as OCR 
fonts for invoices. also tables are very useful.

Any chance of being able to create pdf forms ?

not on my list. maybe in the future.

so... noone willing to write the user docs?

anyway - i have a question. do you think that it would be useful 
to have tabs, as fixed positions inside lines to go to with a tab 
command in the middle of a paragraph?

i think that all cases where this could be useful can be solved with 
tables.

can you explain further on tabs?

eg you set tabs to [30 60 90] then when you write:

some text
 tab "some other text"

some other text

 will start at the next tab position (30 mm from the margin, 60 mm 
 from the margin etc, depending on where "some text" ends out)

btw, new update fixing a bug

I think tabs will be good when importing text from a script's console 
output, for instance.

tabs are good.

I'd really like to do the docs, but I'm so overloaded.

detab the script source first ;)

i know that tabs are good - i wonder if they are needed.

They're good because they're needed aren't they ? ;-)

I have not read through the whole thread.


But, there is mention of space and page break. What is the issue 
now?

Is it because of 'unexpected' page break?

anton, if you can convince me they are needed (i.e. there are things 
that are useful to do that can't be done without them) :)

otherwise, i'll end up with an infinite list of things to add.

How did you implement the leading indent at the beginning of paragraphs 
? Is that not in reality a kind of tab ?

Excuse me if I sound a bit disconnected. I do not clearly envisage 
yet how it should be used.

that is a fixed space, not a tab.