World: r3wp

unless it's one of those compressed pdf formats

Folks, I'm having a problem. How can I extract just the web links 
inside a pdf ?

There are tools (which I know of) in linux such as pdftotext.  I 
presume the web links would appear in the output text, then you can 
use rebol parse to extract the links from that.

Is there any way to go from pdf to makedoc format?

no

Is a pdf file compressed or encrypted. Is there anyway to parse it?

Depends on the PDF editor and how it was saved.
Yes, it can be compressed.  Yes, it can be protected (encrypted).
It can also be just PostScript at its core.

Also, keep in mind, PDF can contain all sorts of junk...

Go here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format
Jump to PostScript....

Reichart PDF was created in the way no executable postript code could 
be possible (no if no jumps no execute AND no write to disc) That 
is main advatage of PDF. Anyway it is possible to PDF contains tons 
of shit never would be imaged on page (old versions of documents 
for example).

.

How tuff would it be to parse out the image data from a pdf file...or 
for that matter, the text. Formating not important...
Or does anyone know of a good lib or dll that does this?

You can't

unless the text is embedded in the pdf ... in which case there are 
utilties to pull it out.

if it's all grahphic ... eg. a scanned pdf .. then you need to ocr 
it.

I ocr pdfs all the time .... because my scanner produces PDFs

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