World: r3wp

Can PDF-Maker be used to create PDF-Forms that can be filled out 
by users with Acrobat Reader?

don't think so ...

Robert, I don't have any support for forms yet.

Ok. I don't know a lot about PDF files, but using the Adobe tools 
to make forms is a pain in the ...

Doing this via a simple dialect would be very cool. Could become 
a nice tool.

Graham, Thanks for the reply...I've been working on the house so 
my computer has been down for a few days...anyway:

I have found some utilites to extract images and text but I'm building 
a tool in rebol to coordinate the conversion of pdf's to text and 
extracted images, to edit them, and to upload. I was hopig for a 
rebol solution to incorporate it all into one app. The tool will 
be used by non-tech so I wanted it simple as possible.

How do these extaction utilities work? Are they no parsing out the 
image data?

Are they not parsing out the image data?

goodluck is all I can say.

depending on how the PDF file is built, extracting text and images 
could be trivial, or very difficult.

Looking at the files in a text editor I believe I can see were image 
data but where it exactly starts and ends I'm not sure. I tried to 
cut and past the data for a small image but I could not load it in 
rebol...just took a shot to  see if it were in some staight forward 
binary format.

Hi. Is this project still alive ? Also, I would like to know if it's 
possible to render mathematical formulas inside (llike in TeX or 
Lout ). Thanks.

Define "alive". :-)

I haven't spent any time on formulas. I don't have a need for that, 
and since it's quite time consuming to do it as good as TeX, I never 
really planned doing it.

Gabriele: good to know it's alive, I was asking the question because 
the pages were not updated till 2006. Is that normal ?

I suppose it must be a hard task to implement math rendering, as 
they may be nested.

it's probably better to go the tex->dvi->pdf route.

kib, that's why I asked "define alive" - if you ask whether I am 
working on it now, then no. if you ask whether i'll fix bugs that 
are reported, then yes, but you may have to wait.

it's not hard to render math. it's just that TeX is very well tuned 
(uses the correct spacing between things), which is just a long list 
of rules and parameters. One could get that out from the TeX source... 
otherwise it just takes a long time to tweak all the parameters to 
get a nice looking result.

then, there's the problem of the fonts. TeX has its own fonts which 
are designed correctly. TTF is not even close to what MetaFont can 
do, and the standard symbol font is not as good as the TeX fonts. 
Even if I added a good formula renderer to the pdf maker, without 
a good font it wouldn't look very good anyway.

Hi, are there any simple examples to get started with PDFM2 ?

Isn't there an example with the distribution?

you mean test.pdf ?

I presume so ... I haven't looked at pdfm2 for years

I am looking at that and trying to learn how to do things, but it's 
quite complex.. well I got some of the basics out already and am 
slowly forming my own pdf

I got to the point where document looks more like it should at the 
end so it will be doable :) ... still havent figured out how to set 
a fill color on something like a box or a table cell/row

This is my sample script so far : http://www.refaktor.si/storage/try1.r
  this is the PDF it generates so far  (I need to make an invoice) 
http://www.refaktor.si/storage/test.pdf

Gabriele: I have few questions if I may :) 

- how to make certain tablecells / rows bg-colored (like light gray) 
...

- how to know what fonts are available, can I add mine (will this 
work on linux too, testing on windos now)

- I need to have non-asci characters work too (my lang has šèž) could 
this be a big problem?

Thanks a ton for making pdf maker

for example I see cell-decor as a place to define bg-color but if 
I put it into cell definition next to width (or any other place) 
I get "cell-decor has no value"

the keyword is just "decor".

eg. from test-pdfm.r

table test [56 86 56] [ ] [
        top padding 3 stretch 2
        bottom padding 3 stretch 2
        left padding 3
        right padding 3
        decor [
            paint edge width 0.2 255.255.0 [
                xtr - 2 ybl + 2

                bezier xtr + 1.5 ybl + 2 xtr - 2 ybl - 1.5 xtr - 2 ybl + 2
                xtr - 2 ytr - 2

                bezier xtr - 2 ytr + 1.5 xtr + 1.5 ytr - 2 xtr - 2 ytr - 2
                xbl + 2 ytr - 2

                bezier xbl - 1.5 ytr - 2 xbl + 2 ytr + 1.5 xbl + 2 ytr - 2
                xbl + 2 ybl + 2

                bezier xbl + 2 ybl - 1.5 xbl - 1.5 ybl + 2 xbl + 2 ybl + 2
                close
            ]
        ]

you'll probably just use a box so it's much simpler.

fonts: only the 14 standard pdf fonts are available.

hi Gabriele .. I used decor as in your example to make table vitw 
visible grid ... but is it possible to make just specific cells with 
for example different fill color, or color ... I see it in code but 
can't use it  


upthere is my example http://www.refaktor.si/storage/test.pdfhttp://www.refaktor.si/storage/try1.r

they are: Times-Roman, Times-Bold, Times-Italic, Times-BoldItalic, 
Helvetica, Helvetica-Bold, Helvetica-Oblique, Helvetica-Oblique, 
Courier, Courier-Bold, Courier-Oblique, Courier-BoldOblique, Symbol, 
ZapfDingbats

what you see in the example above is the default decor. you can set 
a custom decor in each cell... i think at the beginning of the cell 
block, but i don't remember, i'd need to check.

(yes, beginning of cell block.)

http://www.colellachiara.com/soft/PDFM2/pdf-maker.html#section-3.3

uh, I tried cell-decor and decor probably not on the beginning ... 
ah I only got it now cell-decor is name of word that defines 'decor 
as a rure

rule

non-ascii: the only supported encoding so far is latin1 (basically... 
more precisely i think i have it set to the Windows variation, which 
iirc is windows-1252) - that is, the same that View uses on western 
Windows installations.

unfortunately the PDF format does not have direct support for encodings 
except for the default windows encoding, the default mac encoding, 
and an adobe encoding; they are all variations of latin1.

to do anything else font tricks are often being used. i wish they 
just had support for utf-8...

yes, we just started to suspect that what you said about encoding

do you know anything about this http://www.tv.com.pl/stepbystep/pdfinclude/
 .. I am trying by manually editing the pdf file but so far no changes

( about decor I tried in table cell  decor [ set-fill 50.50.50 ] 
and there were no errors  -- but I don't see any background .. )

if i ever get to the point of adding support for custom fonts, then 
i might be able to also give the fonts any encoding.

( but encoding is 100x bigger problem for me )

you need to do something like                           decor [box 
line width 0 xbl ybl xtr - xbl ytr - ybl]

but with a solid box instead