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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.

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.

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

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

http://www.lerup.com/printfile/<--- would this be a good way to 
print PDFs easily from rebol under windows?

haven't tried (don't have a printer), but if it can print postscript, 
then it can print graphics

I  can do this pretty much with html, or PDFmaker with acrobat version 
x, but I would a more exact publicly usable solution.

I don't think you can do that 100% within rebol, but Printfile seems 
to let you spool PS from a watched directory. Store a PDF or PS file 
in that specific directory and it will be printed. Printfile can't 
run as a service or in the background it seems.

It's easier under Linux where you can employ PDF2PS and just feed 
it to LPR, which will then print it.

Henrik did you try using SRVANY.EXE ? (runs any program as a service).
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q137890/

I'd like somehow to plot a child's growth over the top of a pdf such 
as this.

I'd hate to have to redraw this in the plot dialect just to stick 
a few points on it.

So, given such a pdf, all I have to do is figure out where to put 
the 0, 0 and the scale, and try plotting to it?

well, basically updating a pdf works this way:

each object has an id and a generation number; the generation number 
must be incremented when you update the object, that is when you 
append a new object to the file that should actually replace the 
old

you need to provide a new xref for this new object and referring 
to the old xref

this one contains a lot of binary

if you are lucky and the source pdf has a simple structure, and all 
your source pdfs have the same structure, then this might be very 
easy

(the xref generator in the pdf maker only works for the main xref 
of the file, not the change xrefs, but it should be easy to change 
it to generate a change xref)

depending on how much you need to parse the original file, you may 
need to just read a few pages, or learn the whole spec

since ps doesn't have a structure like this

I might have a go that way then.

now, all I have to do is learn a bit of PS :)

it depends a lot on your source files. it may be easier with pdf 
if you don't need to parse much, otherwise if you need to you could 
need to implement decompression and so on.

I got my "Hello World" at the bottom of the page, bottom left.  But 
the pdf which was originally one page, now has a second blank page.

Which makes me wonder if we shouldn't have a ps-maker dialect.

Having done a few graphs now in postscript, and it seems fairly easy 
to do .. make be those expert in dialects could look at constructing 
a postscript dialect.  This makes for great output, and potentially 
seems easier to do than creating pdfs.

easier? I thought pdf was a simpler subset of pdf?

I've always wanted to build a postscript emitter for REBOL. This 
would solve many problems in the printing area.

it would be cool if you could take a DRAW block and convert that 
to postscript

that shouldn't be hard. actually, being that ps is forth, once you 
code the functions you need it's almost a 1:1 translation

well, if lines, curves, text and general paper size handling could 
be done first, that would be a very good thing

text is a different issue, you need to do the typesetting yourself, 
and you eventually need to handle fonts.

for the typesetter, the one i'm designing for pdf maker 2 could be 
easily reused (based on TeX, and i will write it as a RLP so you'll 
have full docs)

would you mind if I made a group that would focus on the challenges 
in such an effort?

I have to design a complex form with lots of boxes and text. Is there 
a dialect to define that ? thxs

Gabriele, will you have a pdf-maker 2 alpha ?

btw, I just fixed a bug with the View 1.3 version of the pdf-maker 
and images.

I just printed a PDF doc and it shows 3 different measures: 1) the 
preview window shows 210,02 x 297,01 2) Document: 211,0 x296,7 and 
3) Paper: 209,9x296,7 Weird!

REBOL/View 1.3.50.3.1 14-Oct-2005 Core 2.7.0
Copyright 2000-2005 REBOL Technologies.  All rights reserved.
REBOL is a trademark of REBOL Technologies. WWW.REBOL.COM
>> change-dir winpath-to-file "C:\rebol\scripts\pdf_maker"
== %/C/rebol/scripts/pdf_maker/
>> do %pdf-maker.r
>> myLayPdf: layout-pdf [[textbox ["This is some text."]]]
** Script Error: Cannot use add on none! value
** Where: make-pages
** Near: pid: (2 * length? pages) + i
foreach
>>

There was a reason - already forgot it.

The only thing in user.r was the function above (except set-net) 
- and I removed it ;-)
But:
REBOL/View 1.3.2.3.1 5-Dec-2005 Core 2.6.3
Copyright 2000-2005 REBOL Technologies.  All rights reserved.
REBOL is a trademark of REBOL Technologies. WWW.REBOL.COM
>> change-dir to-rebol-file "C:\rebol\scripts\pdf_maker"
== %/C/rebol/scripts/pdf_maker/
>> do %pdf-maker.r
>> myLayPdf: layout-pdf [[textbox ["This is some text."]]]
** Script Error: Cannot use add on none! value
** Where: make-pages
** Near: pid: (2 * length? pages) + i


Could it be connected with that I am starting rebol with view.exe 
-i ?

it's also possible that the 2-jun-2006 version has a bug; it was 
released to fix a bug with images, and it's not to exclude that it 
introduced another bug, although i haven't got any reports about 
it.

ah, confirmed it was a bug. i just fixed it and uploaded a new version.

my plan is to eventually have that in version 2 (a first release 
of version 2 is due in a couple weeks). however, note that while 
the pdf format directly supports latin1 encoding, it does not support 
unicode encodings directly. so it's a pain to make it work. openoffice, 
for example, creates divides the characters you use in the document 
in groups of 256, then creates a new custom font for each group. 
(i also assume that the 14 standard fonts do not support unicode, 
so you need custom font support to be able to use unicode.)

Are you able to give us a preview of the capabilities of version 
2?

I would want those things as a layer above pdf maker

gabriele, I was more thinking about general page layout, not the 
lower level text flow functions, so you  can decide a general template 
for your pages on your own.

that's what I would like to see pre-prepared on a higher level

i.e. it's much more flexible than TeX actually, however there are 
a number of drawbacks; you can't apply a fit algorithm to pages (boxes 
in this case) if they are not all the same width.

higher level: well, the first application of the pdfm2 will be a 
qml emitter, and i guess the second will be a md3 emitter.

I'm going to add a MDP emitter as well :-)) Looks very good!!

this question might not entirely be related to PDF Maker, but I had 
an idea of using Pages for MacOSX to create pretty PDF documents 
with areas where text can be put in by a separate program and then 
create a new PDF (not X-Forms) for printing. This would require the 
ability to search/replace text in PDFs. Is this possible with compressed 
PDFs?

you have to parse it out and rebuild it. (or at least recreate some 
objects and append them as a change, but then you have both the original 
and the new version in the file)

the pdf maker is not a markup language :) it's a (rather low level) 
dialect. you generally want to hook up higher level mls to it (like 
makedoc and qml)

to insert a hyphen into a word to split the word up

graham: i'm not using a dictionary, and i'm not sure i want to do 
that in the pdf maker. i think it's more low level than that. otoh, 
doing so could provide some optimization (don't hypenate if it's 
not needed, like TeX does), so i'm not completely against it.

i'm going to play with the penalties and demerits for hypens to see 
if i can get a better output; however the columns in the test are 
pretty small so it's hard to get a good ouput anyway.

also notice that the columns have a different width (i think TeX 
can't do this, not easily at least)

i think TeX has a very good hypenation algorithm (at least it was 
the best at the time)

imagine you want to typeset a sentence in english that quotes a sentence 
in italian...

or, if i ever get to support unicode, a sentence in english that 
quotes japanese.

i want this to stay at a upper layer. :) i will have to do it anyway 
- i'll have to do the pdf emitter for qml for e.g.

e.g. http://www.colellachiara.com/soft/PDFM2/pdf-maker.html#section-3
gives a description of the dialect that you can base the user docs 
on.

e.g. (above url) gives a description of the dialect that you can 
base the user docs on. (text was not visible in previous post)

Anton, only a few things of the text dialect are implemented. i wanted 
to get to a working version as soon as possible so that i could test 
the typesetter easily.

bold and italic are a different font (i.e. you use Times-Italic instead 
of Times-Roman)

Henrik, do you have a fix for the CSS? (actually, i'd need someone 
to create a good CSS for wetan...) I have only tested it on Firefox 
so far.

gabriele, looking at the source, I'm not sure it's enough to fix 
the CSS. it would be far easier to manage if the history and the 
license was wrapped in a table with two cells. the page actually 
also breaks when using Firefox and making the window narrow.

henrik, it does not necessarily need to appear that way. i prefer 
a semantic approach in the source. history and license are just two 
fields, how they are displayed depends on the CSS, not on the xhtml 
structure.

gabriele, well, anyway, I think it's not very easy to place up elements 
next to eachother in a controlled way other than by using a table. 
<div>s are nice, but there are limits to how much fiddling should 
be necessary.

new update - para alignments and a few other things. break-lines 
now always succeeds, at worst producing "ugly" output.

see test.pdf for an example of typesetting a long text into columns, 
with headers etc. (doesn't break just after a header and things like 
this)

new update - finally fixed break-lines (more on this below), added 
widow/orphan penalties and setting of parameters like tolerance, 
interline glue and looseness (the latter allows increasing or decreasing 
the number of lines of a paragraph).

what the problem was with break-lines: as some of you probably know, 
when TeX cannot break a paragraph with a given stretch tolerance, 
it produces overfull boxes, assuming that in such a case manual intervention 
is desirable.

however, i underestimated the problem, since that was a source of 
infinite bugs... i wasn't doing it right.

after many attempts, i decided to think about how the algorithm was 
really supposed to work, so found a good way to implement emergency 
breaks... now i finally fixed all bugs with it and it is working 
fine.

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.

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?

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).

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.

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

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)

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?

btw, new update fixing a bug

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

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.

Mmm.. I can't think of any particular need for tabs off the top of 
my head, but I remember a situation a long time ago where I was editing 
text, tabs were not implemented and I missed them. I'm sorry I can't 
be more specific than that at the moment.

Just tabs are a quick and handy alternative to setting up a table.

does anyone think there are good reasons to support variable widths 
when breaking a table between pages?