World: r3wp

.

and that's what there is to say about that

Has anyone looked at the online PDF proofing market? And adapted/utilised 
 pdf-maker in that way?

proofing - you mean kind of "securing" the document ?

No. google on the term "online pdf proofing" Used by publishers and 
printing to let clients markup / approve pdfs online before going 
to press.

proofing as in proof read

Ok, the usual meaning then.

I'm getting the following message using pdf-maker:


** Script Error: pick expected index argument of type: number logic 
pair
** Where: emit-space
** Near: if k: select/case pick kern

** Press enter to quit...** Script Error: pick expected index argument 
of type: number logic pair
** Where: emit-space
** Near: if k: select/case pick kern
** Press enter to quit...

Can anyone tell me what I am doing wrong?

Here is my code:

append top text
pdf: copy []
page: compose/deep [
    textbox [  
        font Courier 4.5 as-is (:top) 
    ] 
] 
append/only pdf page
write/binary %deposit-slip.pdf layout-pdf pdf
browse %deposit-slip.pdf

about PDF Maker generally, are there plans for updating it, to support 
more fonts and better image handling?

Gabriele has pdf maker 2 in the pipeline ... but no eta in sight

what's inside 'top ?

is there any official place to download pdf-maker-doc.r/pdf ? I seem 
to keep loosing it...

found it.... for reference: http://web.tiscalinet.it/rebol/pdf-maker-doc.r

Gabriele, top is plain text.  It prints a deposit slip.

top: copy ""

what version of rebol are you using?

your code above works here, with top being a text string.

but, it may also depend on the contents of that string, since the 
error appears while typesetting the text. (maybe while kerning, judging 
from the error above)

does right adjustment work? it says so in the docs, but I can only 
get center to work....

I'm using encmdface.1248031.exe

what would the possibilities be for adding fonts? I need access to 
use the OCR font now...

Louis: it's possible that there is some incopatibility with the newer 
versions of rebol. I only tested it with at most 1.2.10 so far. I'll 
see if i can find so time to update it for 1.3 (the code needs to 
be changed for the new image datatype, for example; as a side effect 
it will be much faster with images, though).

other fonts: that's not really trivial. would require some work... 
i'm not sure if i can find the time for that.

maybe I can :-) but I'm only going to study what it takes. OCR fonts 
are necessary for printing certain types of invoices and I want that 
functionality, and that would be very nice to have in my invoice 
program.

what you have to do is: extend the typesetter so that it can read 
font descriptions and build glyph width and kerning pairs tables 
(Volker has an AFM file parser); extend the dialect so that it can 
somehow recognize and load external fonts; study the PDF reference 
to see what you need to do to include the font in the PDF file (at 
the very least, you have to provide a font object; i'm not sure if 
this is sufficient, but i hope that the reader is able to load external 
fonts once you give it the font name and description; in theory you 
should embed the font into the PDF file, which usually means parsing 
the font file and so on)

ok, completely untested, so use at your own risk: http://www.colellachiara.com/soft/Misc/pdf-maker.r
 for View 1.3

note that it also supports alpha channel in images (requires acrobat 
reader 5)

(i'll upload it to rebol.org as soon as someone confirms it works.)

it created a PDF invoice om rebol/view 1.3 for OSX just fine :-) 
I use only boxes, lines, helvetica, helvetica bold and courier though. 
no images or anything

Gabriele, I'll look foreward to the update.  Actually, I use pdf-maker 
all the time.  This is the only time I have experienced a problem.

Henrik, pdf-maker is great. I have one program that creates mailmerge 
letters from data in an object database.  It creates a pdf file, 
allowing me to check each letter before printing it.  I can also 
pick out just one letter in the file to print.  Or, if the printer 
jams, it is easy to begin anew printing just the remaining letters. 
And, of course, I can use the program on any operating system.  Nice.

Gabriele, thanks! somehow I didn't notice that you have already posted 
the update. You are FAST!

I'll do some testing and get back with you.  It may take me several 
days, however, as I am in the middle of several projects right now.

louis: yes, I've used it in a few apps so far with great success, 
because it's very stable and fast. the only things I miss are better 
font handling, some better docs and importing vector drawings into 
a PDF. Getting OCR fonts in will really make it useful for me.

I've also been thinking about building a very simple application 
to let you create pdf's graphically to make the process simpler. 
of course it would be no where near a DTP application, but it would 
speed up generation of more complex stuff

I think there is great potential to unifying all the tools that are 
forming now: pdf-maker, AGG, SVG input and makedoc2. Allow these 
things to talk to eachother! imagine making a drawing in AGG or import 
an SVG into a DRAW and then use the very same block with layout-pdf. 
Future versions of makedoc could print pdfs as well as HTML through 
pdf-maker. by letting these tools use eachother, the combination 
could be a very fast and powerful document creation system.

AGG to PDF Maker is rather trivial for most cases; no gradients in 
PDF Maker though. i also didn't expose access to the CTM, pdf maker 
only offers higher level operations like scaling, rotations and translations.

I am interested to understand format of metrics definition blocks. 
Is it possible to use them to get language specific characters correctly 
displayed?

Are there any short documentation/description how to use pdf-tables.r?

1) no; 2) no. Sorry. Supporting other charsets requires changes to 
the code AND to the font metrics data. About pdf-tables, never got 
to document it at all. i don't have any simple example either, except 
from some i provided here or on the ml long time ago.

Thanks for anwers!

I don't know any thing about PDF, but I did couple functions for 
encoding conversation.

Could it be a "quick hack" or it requires good background of PDF 
format ?

it might be a quick hack, but i need to check the docs for PDF... 
but IIRC for an encoding different from the default you need to provide 
a char table or something like that...

It is probably a bit funny, but I used to put both of following head 
part in my HTML pages:

    <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=windows-1257">

    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-10">

It worked so that it was corectly displayed in M$ Exploer and Opera.

The Baltic Rim ( "Windows Baltic Microsoft code page – cp 1257") 
is the standart.

I will send to your e-mail couple of images with characters and codes.

Would it be possible to use PDF-maker to extract just a pure text 
from PDF files?

I think PDF-makes is a generator not a parser.

I know, I was just thinking, if it's easily possible to use it as 
a PDF decoder, but will rather use this http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdftohtml/
and then use Rebol to parse the HTML

hm, Copying of text from this document is not allowed. :(

Probably it has some level of security. PDF has a layered system 
of rights.

So I have to recompile the sources:-)