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I now have a GTK widget that can show PDF documents

In this DocumentFreedomDay-2012-playlist you can also find the film 
of Kaj's presentation about Red bindings with WebODF, LibreOffice 
and PDF last week in the Royal Library in The Hague, the Netherlands.

For Git command-line users, a useful cheat sheet: 


http://jan-krueger.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/git-cheat-sheet.pdf

I'll finish my new CMS first, or I should say publishing system together 
with the scripts I put on rebol.org lately. Then I will be able to 
publish code and story easier within my pages. I don't want the massive 
make-doc-pro and makedoc2 isn't my flavor. The ancient version from 
Chris Ross-Gill looks good but has some choices I dislike. So I am 
struggling with it too make it easy to use and with it I want to 
be able to generate a pdf version using Gabriele's pdf-maker script.

So 1 source and generate goodlooking webpages or pdf with it.

Doc-strings are now allowed in Red/System function spec:

https://github.com/dockimbel/Red/commit/b7f46eafe75b43f43d7cb282d4415e89c2858a5e


So, who's going to write a short and nice REBOL script now to extract 
them (extracting also the context where they are defined)? :-) Ideally, 
those info should be collected into a simple nested block structure 
that can be easily processed for generating formatted text output, 
HTML, PDF (using pdf-maker lib), ... (take make-doc.r script as example 
of parser/emitter separation, and plugable emitters).

Jerry: symbol! datatype is not reachable for Red users, it's an internal 
feature. I might also add series! and context! datatypes, it will 
be for internal use only too. You can see the types hierarchy at 
page 22 of this presentation: 

http://static.red-lang.org/Red-SFD2011-45mn.pdf

(the types in italic are internal types, not accessible for Red programming).

Regarding docs, the issue for me, and perhaps others, is that reading 
html on your portable device requires an internet connection. So, 
an offline version such as epub or pdf is an advantage

GrahamC: yes, I totally agree. I am quite often out of Internet connexion 
for long periods, so I do appreciate long html pages that I can save, 
rather than bunches of small html pages. A large pdf is even better. 
Or a large .txt file, actually.

Well, all the existing Red docs are on github, so feel free to add 
PDF generation, I will gladly add them to the web site.

I'm not sure the Makedoc version I'm using supports PDF export though...it 
might need an upgrade to MD3.

 is that what is in Red/docs ?

 Yes...except the "Red/System BNF grammar" doc that is produced directly 
 in PDF format by Rudolf.

MD3: I don't remember...but I sort of remember a MD version with 
PDF export...

Hasn't Gabriele done a MD-to-PDF converter by any chance?

I have a rather tortuous path using makedoc => asciidoc => pdf/epub

Yes, Gabriele has a PDF generator. Don't remember if it supports 
MakeDoc format

Can't someone from the community make a MD to Gab's PDF dialect converter?

Gab's PDF emitter is pretty old now.  Doesn't support active links

Not sure how it works in PDF, but I wrote a VID/Postscript converter, 
using the layout engine of VID to "typeset" in postscript. Maybe 
this is the way to go for a PDF typesetter.

i made a pdf emitter for QML: http://www.colellachiara.com/soft/Misc/qml/

still old stuff, though.

Bindings not in there are SDL and OpenGL, for graphical 2D and 3D 
programs, ZeroMQ for network messaging, and some specific extra widgets 
for the GTK+ binding, such as a (real) web browser, two map browsers 
and a PDF and other document viewer

Thanks for the welcome back message.
 

 I left off asking about the mySQL driver. So I want to insert into 
 a database a random number the code already generated and associate 
 it with an email address that was provided by a CGI form. Have yet 
 to create this in the real world but for now let us assume I will 
 call the database "customers". The people who process the credit 
 card and collect the email address advised me that the address will 
 be labelled "trnEmailAddress".


 After finding the mySQL driver Here is what I figured out using placeholders 
 for things like password, etc. Would appreicate knowing if this is 
 correct.

; Loads MySQL driver
do %mysql-driver/mysql-protocol.r
; Opens connection to MySQL server
db: open mysql://[[user][:pass]@]host[:port]/database


; Send query to database server. Enters random number from above. 
customers is probably the name of the database I will create

insert db ["INSERT INTO customers VALUES (?,?)" "trnEmailAddress" 
"token"]



 Next I need to insert an existing PDF file (an e-book) into a directory 
 created by the script. The directory will be named after a random 
 number that was earlier generated by the script. I am astounded that 
 I can not find the command to copy a file. So the variable assigned 
 to this random number is called "token".

 So I have the following.

make-dir %token/


 How do I copy a file into this new directory? Also, is that the corecct 
 way to make a directory?

It's not written in any where in the REBOL documents. Even in Core 
PDF.

Has anyone worked with the Amazon aws services?  I'm not sure how 
to "Calculate an RFC 2104-compliant HMAC with the SHA256 hash algorithm" 
as described in step 8 on page 62 here:  http://awsdocs.s3.amazonaws.com/Associates/latest/prod-adv-api-dg.pdf

Bo: There is Viktor Pavlu's "REBOL Essentials" in pdf form.

We might have another good alternative option to the wiki (maybe 
easier and more flexible): use a github repo for all the    documentation 
pages in makedoc format, and have external export batch script to 
export them in HTML, PDF or whatever format.

So the Red docs are not makedoc(2) specific. You only want to be 
sure that they are in a format that can be handled using scripts 
like makedoc123 and generate all kinds of documenttypes, like webpages, 
pdf, (epub?) etc. If I understand correct.

I'd still think that doing it in the graphics engine is simpler than 
in PDF. For R3, someone is probably going to do it anyway.

I've spent a lot of time with MDP, written a whole distributed application 
with pages based upon the principles of MDP.  The biggest mess in 
MDP is the need to make HTML pages, which is a fossil and pretty 
awful, but widespread.  People need HTML so we output that.  People 
may want PDF, or RTF or Postscript or MarkDown, or whatever.  Those 
parts will always be a mess because the formats of all those outputs 
are a mess.

I have a PDF with the state diagram for HTTP, that may help you figure 
out the error problem. It's also possible that it was intentional 
in the sense that it is safer to initiate a new connection in case 
of error (though, some errors should be exceptions to this).

as far as i know, zip files allow prefix payload, so you can put 
stuff before the actual .zip file starts... just like REBOL allows 
stuff before the header.   I've seen a demo of a single file which 
is  an .exe,  .pdf ,  and .zip all at the same  time!

Is it the look of the code in this document: http://www.colellachiara.com/soft/PDFM2/pdf-maker.html
that is asked for?

That's great Geomol.
Yes the pdf-maker docs are a good example.
I would stick with gabriele's color for a start.

I am enhancing the rebol Haru PDF binding again , in the meantime 
I added support for getting position of current "text cursor" (which 
was the problem back then).. I needed it to detect when to go to 
new-page with pdf. Now I also added support for images (jpg and png). 
I am using Git so code is here: http://github.com/jankom/RebHaruPDF
.. it's still heavy in progress and there is a nicer OO interface 
than the one in sample_images.r (that is using the lowest level direct 
functions from binding because I am testing if it works at all with 
it)

Basically I am writing to ask something ... I am newbie at writing 
rebol bindings. This binding if it works it works but if almost anything 
goes wrong it simply crashes. For example missing some file, not 
going into TEXT mode , not oppening closing something, page reference 
insted of pdf doc reference given to some function in binding .. 
pdf that we intend to write being locked (alredy open in acrobat)... 
ETC ... 


I intend to write this robust now, so I am asking how is this usually 
done? I can check for preconditions before talking to binding at 
runtime in rebol. Another (better) option is that binding shouldn't 
just crash for anything that goes wrong. I saw in docs something 
about error messages as return, so maybe I am doing something wrong 
in the first place , for example not implementing or setting up some 
callback for errors... Anyone more experienced than me? Rebol Haru 
could be quite capable otherwise, it supports all things that are 
really messy to do in PDF (encodings, embedding fonts, images, encryption, 
graphics, ...).

One thing is that I can check for these preconditions at runtime,

We also added a rewritten picture viewer, a new PDF reader and a 
number of new dock applets. An updated version of our web browser 
is available separately.

For Syllable itself it's the usual mix of gradual improvements all 
over the system. Lately, most of the bigger improvements have been 
in the included applications. Among others, there are new versions 
of ABrowse, our browser, XPDF, our PDF reader, and a rewrite of Whisper, 
the email client

50mb and includes.. 


XMMS (MP3, CD Music, and MPEG), FTP client, Dillo web browser, links 
web browser, FireFox, spreadsheet, Sylpheed email, spellcheck (US 
English), a word-processor (FLwriter), three editors (Beaver, Vim, 
and Nano [Pico clone]), graphics editing and viewing (Xpaint, and 
xzgv), Xpdf (PDF Viewer), emelFM (file manager), Naim (AIM, ICQ, 
IRC), VNCviwer, Rdesktop, SSH/SCP server and client, DHCP client, 
PPP, PPPoE (ADSL), a web server, calculator, generic and GhostScript 
printer support, NFS, Fluxbox window manager, games, system monitoring 
apps, a host of command line tools, USB support, and pcmcia support, 
some wireless support.

http://www.travelplan.it/pdf/milan_guide.pdf

Ashley, can you explain in a little more detail how your setup works 
for you?

 Sure. I run a home office with two studies. Each has a Mac mini (plus 
 Cinema display) for day-to-day work. My study also has a TabletPC 
 connected to a 1280x1024 VGA LCD display. I use this for REBOL development 
 and demos away from home.


The iBook is located in the other study and is used by my better 
half when running Windows software related to our finance company 
(CRM/Sales software distributed via the professional body we belong 
to, no Mac or Linux option available). We also use the iBook when 
showing non-IT people stuff (e.g. a spreadsheet showing how much 
their portfolio could be worth if they geared it) and when attending 
training sessions.


The ADSL modem has an ethernet connection to Airport express, which 
in turn has the MFC plugged into its USB slot. The Mac's pick up 
the printer automatically, the TabletPC runs Bonjour and does the 
same. Everything, including the TabletPC, detected the Network without 
issue. It really has been as simple as, 1) Unpack, 2) Plug-in, 3) 
Use. I've also noticed that WinXP running on the iBook is a lot faster/smoother 
than on the TabletPC as it installs 'clean' (i.e. piggy-backs off 
the Mac's Network and Hardware support).


Large screens are a must if you write and or read a lot of documents. 
A 1920x1200 screen lets you do a slideshow on a PDF document and 
read the pages side-by-side. On wide screens I always have the task-bar/dock 
on the right to maximize the vertical display area.

There is a spec for serial numbers in http://www.usb.org/developers/devclass_docs/usbmassbulk_10.pdf
(§4.1.1)

It seems for me too the best aproach too.

One another case where to use encoding funcions could be PDF maker 
- I had trouble to get pdf output into special characters of my language.

janeks: unfortunately the pdf format does not support unicode, so 
that's not trivial to do... i will do it, eventually.

Here an article that could be usefull someday
http://dafx04.na.infn.it/WebProc/Proc/P_201.pdf

Hello Denis,


So, one of the things a group of us have been talking about is doing 
some group lessons (world wide).


We have researched some tools for making this possible.  We narrowed 
it down to Macromedia's Breeze.  In fact last week I talked for about 
2 hours with their team (meaning the people that actually designed 
and programmed it).


This week I'm talking to their OEM leads about integrating Breeze 
from Rebol into Web applications.


So our first Breeze interactive lesson will be in a few weeks is 
my guess.  WE have not idea how good it will be with more than 10 
people, and world wide, but we are going to try.


As to a road map.  Programming languages in general are difficult 
to learn in a methodical method.  Rebol being even more difficult 
(in my opinion), because learning the structure does not help very 
much.  Even learning how Rebol works is not all that usefull (compared 
to lets say Basic, or a Batching system).

I will make some simple suggestions though:


1.	Go to Rebol.com, and read what is offered there.  It actually 
is a good starting point.  Rebol Essentials" which is a PDF on the 
site is worth reading.


2.	Write your own dictionary.  Literally, pick a given word in Rebol, 
use it in a sentence.  And just work your way through all 400+ words. 
 You can do it in a few hours.  All you need to do is try to use 
it in a way the Rebol Dictionary does not use it.



3.	Build something you really want to build.  Unless you have a goal, 
working on anything is going to be boring.  Think of a utility, or 
a game that you have always wanted to understand better, or want 
to play with, and build it.  Another cool concept is to simply copy 
it from an existing version in some other language you already know, 
or that is more simple (like Basic).

The pdf manual "Rebol Essentials" comes close to that. It seems to 
be a good starting point.

Oldes, can you tell me the name of that spec. I believe they are 
pdf's, right?

Oldes, I downloaded the ActionScript pdf which seems to be the very 
much related to the dialect examples. Is that correct?

Volker, I've just begun to really get into the dialect so I can't 
comment on how one "translates" the actionscript into it, however, 
the actionscript pdf is at least a start into trying to figure out 
the examples.

At this point, I am taking one of the examples from the flash actionscript 
pdf and rework it into the dialect form. Before I had this documentation 
I was just guessing at the whole process.

er.. one more.. 

At a high level, Adobe AIR accomplishes this by taking the world-class 
WebKit browser engine (most notably used in Safari), and wrapping 
it alongside Flash and PDF technologies, as a cohesive desktop runtime.

pekr, of course all these things are already available for OSX and 
have been for a long time. One thing that kind of surprised me is 
how many apps surpass Windows equivalents in quality, simply because 
the underlying foundation with Cocoa is incredibly strong. You can 
tap into a lot of amazing functions and the OS itself can do things 
where Windows would need third party software to do the same.

For example, look at Jaime's presentation from the REBOL conference. 
It was done in Keynote which is a presentation program made by Apple 
which makes Powerpoint look like a silly joke. It uses full 3D hardware 
acceleration and can apply pixel shader effects to the presentation 
through Core Image. By having a very strong set of video functions 
as well, presentations can be exported to a lot of different videoformats 
from DV to H264 or MPEG4, etc. in any size or framerate. You can 
also convert parts of it to a PDF document or a bitmap image. All 
this is possible, because OSX does this in Cocoa and is available 
at the developer's fingertips. This is also what made apps like iMovie 
possible, because they integrate into OSX.


Often the wrong question to ask is "Does program X exist for OSX?", 
because the programs are different and often of much higher quality. 
A lot of programs don't even have Windows equivalents. The community 
reminds me a bit of what bedroom programmers did during the old days 
of the Amiga, when they used the hardware and made beautiful demos. 
There are a lot of small, free apps available that do 2-3 things.

http://www.firebirdsql.org/pdfmanual/Firebird-1.5-QuickStart.pdf
.. works for me.

MonetDB/X100 paper - http://www.cwi.nl/htbin/ins1/publications?request=pdf&key=ZuBoNeHe:DEBULL:05

It was suggested in the PDF-Maker group that it could be possible 
to convert a DRAW block to postscript. I think that would be a good 
approach.

imo this is so big waste of time, it even does not deserve separate 
group. PS is good for what nowadays? Printers? Who does use it? At 
least for documents in corporate sphere, thre are only two kinds 
of docs which will survive imo - PDF, and XML based docs.

I think, PS is good for printing too. I haven't looked deep into 
it, so I can't say, if PDF is enough. Does printers understand PDF 
directly, as they do PS? If not, PS is the way.

PDF is also only a subset of postscript, created so you don't need 
to compile your docs everytime they need to be displayed. PDFs are 
static. You still need postscript to do the actual printing AFAIK. 
The trick would be not necesarily to generate a PS file, but the 
data that could be fed to the printer through LP.

there are full docs on how both pdf and postscript work available 
from adobe.com

we now have big printers, which do understand PDF ....

A couple of thoughts: 1. ".doc" is probably more prevalent. I see 
a lot and I do work in the corporate world. In fact, most of my document 
correspondence with IBM is with either Word files or Excel spreadsheets. 
(Not that I am suggesting doing any one of teh two, though being 
able to create .doc and .xls files natively would be incredible). 
2. I use PS only to later translate them with Distiller to pdf. But 
then again,  I have the regular version of Acrobat so I can. It's 
not that I want to but Pekr has a point about the usefullness and 
popularity of pdf. 3. For professional printing use, I suppose PS 
is still very useful. But I think that is the high-end side.

I guess what I am saying is, is there anything that a pdf doc can't 
do or support that you want to have?

BTW, can you imagine being able to create pdf forms, populate them, 
and save the data? That would be cool. You have to have the non-free 
version of acrobat to do that.

Gabriele mentioned that a postscript emitter wouldn't be very hard 
to do, compared to PDF.

The reason I have anything more to do with PS is that  I use Pagestream 
for all my DTP and it has some quirks with its "save as pdf" So I've 
had to print to a PS driver, then convert it with Distiller.

Well, it something to weigh out for sure.  A couple thoughts. That 
link references 98 and NT so back in those days, yeah, we had PS 
on Mac and for me, the Amiga. Today, however, wouldn't pdf's be the 
bomb? And other, less technical, people don't have to do much to 
print them. They also don't have to worry about sending them to others.

It makes sense to be able to produce both PS and PDF from within 
REBOL, and it'll help solve the printing problem to some degree, 
I think.

Henrik, I think, supporting PS is a good thing! (TM) And we can still 
have PDF for those, who likes that. Has anyone done some work on 
PS in REBOL so far? Any scripts anywhere?

Henrick print PS files only works if the printer has PS support. 
Not every printer has this, and Apple move NextStep from PS to PDF 
because the PS rendering engine of Adobe is expensive. So PS printing 
will only work for PS printers. I think that is sort of ok, but not 
sure everyone has a PS printer.

Not to discourage you. I think PDF is more universal and the PDF 
viewer can print to any printer, inkjets and lasers.

Also OSX can print PDFs directly, it can even render directly to 
any media, because it includes a PDF render in the OS.

In other platforms this is not that easy. You need that PDF renderer 
in the middle to be able to print ot inkjets.

I get lots of end-users (typically on Windows) asking me about PDF, 
with zero enquiries on PS. I'd go so far as to say that very few 
non-technical folks have even heard of PS these days.

I lean toward PDF too, but the dialect is not much fun to use, it 
can take a long time to load, and you have to preview it before printing, 
not too mention versioning issues. Thats why I had been looking for 
a BMP printing solution. I was considering using PS for printing 
only images directly to printers, which would still be nice--mainly 
for non-win OS's. I think this would be much easier to impliment. 
I dont know squat about post script, but it could potentially be 
just a hack.

you can use ghostscript to print pdf too afaik.

As I said in the pdf maker group ... postscript is a much easier 
thing to do than pdf.  I could then do high resolution graphs in 
postscript, and then use ghostscript or other utilities view and 
print.  Conversion to pdf is another possibility.

Graham - either give me native rebol post script viewer, or forget 
it. I will not install ghost script - being there, done that. Because 
- today, in corporate sphere, there are two output interfaces - browser, 
or PDF Reader - noone will install anything else. I do agree that 
to get things right using html/css in cross browser manner may be 
pretty difficult task, but imo that postscript should be somehow 
- hidden?

Here's a first attempt at drawing postscript and then converting 
to pdf ... http://www.compkarori.com/emr/growth.pdf

Both PostScript and PDF ref. manuals are found on www.adobe.com. 
I took a quick look and found out, that PDF is mainly a document 
format incl. things as hypertext links and logical structure information 
for document interchange. Postscript's primary application is to 
describe the appearance of text, graphical shapes, and sampled images 
on printed and displayed pages. It makes good sense producing PostScript 
from REBOL to enhance printing abilities, and if it's much easier 
than pdf (as Graham points out), there is good probability of success. 
And supporting PostScript doesn't exclude pdf. We can have both, 
and it's two different things with different goals.

Gregg, OSX moved from PS renderer of NeXT to a PDF one. This was 
to save money from licensing the PS engine from Adobe. Currently 
PS is converted to PDF by third party tools. PDF on the other hand 
is direct.

I thought about this subject yesterday night and yeah, it would be 
nice to be able to do "anything and everything" in Rebol and PS does 
offer that. Besides the kind of charts that Graham showed, things 
like wrapping/flowing text around graphic images would be useful. 
Of course at some point I would most likely convert it to pdf through 
Distiller. 

I totally agree that good clean output is essential. My last programming 
foray in PS was some 16 years ago. At that time it was the only way 
to go for me. I suppose that alone shows the staying power of PS.

Gregg, it's like cgi... unless you've got a web server, cgi is a 
waste of time for you.  If I have a web service that uses a postscript 
dialect to create a postscript image, and then uses ghostscript to 
convert to pdf .. well, that is useful to those running web services, 
but a waste of time for those who don't.

I also tried it with a pdf, as the printer supports direct pdf printing, 
but nothing happened.

we have Gabriele's pdf dialect to use a model.

his dialect must cover the same problems .. as pdf is a subset of 
postscript.

I found this document describing PostScript structure:

http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/ps/5001.DSC_Spec.pdf

one of the reasons also for a DRAW block is that you can preview 
your output first. Not so easy with PDF Maker...

I didn't discover the error until I tried it on the expensive printer. 
besides the size and position of the line was supposed to be correct. 
the barcode was created with PDF Maker

and it looks correct when viewed in a PDF Viewer

graham, even if I take a good PDF viewer and zoom all the way in

Looks like Volker covered the security issues I'd note.  About Rebol 
as a COM server process--I would think that would be the way to go. 
 Pretty sure that is how Acrobat runs, too.  Basically, the first 
time you run into a PDF on the web Acrobat32 starts, and handles 
all instances.

eg, should pdf maker be built in? of course not!

anton, i agree, the pdf maker 2 merges the two even more (maybe too 
much, but i like it)

Read up on the research on PDF sometime before you start promoting 
Postscript. It is even a good idea to use PDF instead if you are 
outputting through Ghostscript - it can handle it.

That doesn't even include the execution model change from programmatic 
(Postscript) to declarative (PDF).

That's why Apple based its Quartz model on PDF, when they already 
had a Postscript model from NeXT.

XPS is like a cleaned-up, extended PDF, with an XML representation 
if you're into that. The models are similar.

Well, I still think postscript should have become more widespread 
than it ended up being. And you can't change my opinion on that. 
:-) I crave standardization. OK, so if postscript was too hardware 
hungry, then a lighter version could have helped, which is why I 
wonder why PDF came so late.

But they did converge with existing systems, in semantic model. XPS 
is not that far off of PDF in semantics.

It wouldn't be the wrapping of the Windows API that would help Linux 
users, it would be his initial work on making a Draw-like printing 
dialect. Defining the dialect is a large part of the process of supporting 
printing in REBOL. There will be non-Windows-specific parts of Doc's 
implementation that can be adapted to a general printing model for 
REBOL, one that can have multiple implementations with different 
backends. For that matter, there would need to be at least 3 backends: 
GDI (for Windows), Postscript (for Ghostscript) and PDF (for Mac 
Quartz), with a possible XPS backend as a minor variation on the 
PDF one.

So would or wouldn't you advise to go through PDF for printing to 
GhostScript?