AltME groups: search

Carl wants such a list for   form, mold, to string!,  format (but 
that's R3), add the serial form, score some points and help the beginners 
in one grand pdf-maker datatype file.  Not much to ask, is it John? 
 :)

I think it'll be a very useful and worthy entry for DocBase, but 
it would also be nice to use Gabriele's PDF-MAKER or other page layout 
for a nice reference sheet printout.

So...get RT to open DocBase and I'll start right now, oh yeah and 
R3 beta for access to format  :)  Kidding... I was going to be playing 
with PDF-MAKER today, to see if I can add print functionality to 
the Desktop Librarian...maybe I'll use this as a good way learn the 
dialect.  So unless someone else steps up...I'll take a kick at it, 
for R2 datatypes anyway.

I was just kidding...I'm about half way through using your pdf-maker 
(v2) to document the R2 datatypes regarding  to string! form mold. 
 Blog http://www.rebol.net/r3blogs/0092.htmlbut like I everything 
I do now-a-days, it comes pre-expired  :)

To all...by the way, check out Gabriele's pdf-maker.r in rebol.org 
(the docs have a pointer to the new in-progress work for pdfm2). 
 Maybe we'll get printing from REBOL sooner than later.  :)

load mold/all reduce [does [join [ Rebol" "3" ]] ;; thanks. In STSC 
APL we could use 'load' or 'laod' ...
laod: :load  ;; Rebol3 is free of wordspace worry size anxiety
;; my Rebol tutorial would include something on quotes , such as
	>>'test'
	== test'
	>>mold 'test'
	== "test''"

 >>mold join 'test' "tested"  ; note use of {} to avoid double double-quotes
	>> ""test""  ;; error - but which error and why?

 >> "'test''"  ;; be-aware that PDF files may use left-single-quote, 
 right-single-quote, left-double-quote  and single-quote != apostrophe 
 != backtick ...
;; and definitely something to include 
	>> help rejoin
	>> source rejoin

( I am now talking with a publisher. Hurray!  The hard part is behind 
me!   Now to have some fun ...   Dead-line?  What dead-line was that? 
 When!?  )

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

Just wondering if it's possible to combine an existing pdf with the 
pdf-maker.  What I need to do is draw over an existing pdf....

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

it is possible, but not trivial; you don't actually need to change 
the pdf file, just append to it; however you need to parse it to 
do this correctly.

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:

the xref contains the location in the file of any pdf object (such 
as pages, fonts, and so on)

it depends on the source pdf file

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

And this is all automated in pdf-maker2 ?  :)

nope :P and won't be for pdf maker 2 either. but you can use the 
code in the pdf maker to generate the objects and the xref

(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)

the PDF Reference book from Adobe is all you need to do this

Would it be easier to convert the pdf to postscript and then add 
the necessary ps commands??

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 wonder if pdf2ps also extracts out protected pdf text ?

I converted my pdf to postscript.  So, perhaps all I need to do is 
to insert my PS commands before the "showpage" near the end of the 
ps file, and recompile back to pdf ?

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.

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

btw. on the compression issue, is it possible to decompress pdf streams 
inside rebol if they are properly massaged? I thought of building 
template pdf files, where you could search/replace the text inside 
those streams to make new pdfs

Gabriele, just tried out pdf-maker for the first time yesterday. 
Very nice and quite useful.

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)

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!

So maybe PDF uses 211 for the doc but assumes the paper is 210 ?

Why I am getting this error?
>> do %pdf-maker.r
Script: "PDF Maker" (2-Jun-2006)
>> 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
>>

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 ?

>> do %pdf-maker.r
Script: "PDF Maker" (11-Aug-2005)
>> myLayPdf: layout-pdf [[textbox ["This is some text."]]]
== #{
255044462D312E330A342030206F626A0A3C3C202F54797065202F466F6E7420
2F53756274797065202F5479706531202F42617365466F6E74202F48656C...
>>

perhaps your version of pdf-maker.r is corrupted?

seems very strange to me, the pdf maker should not worry about -i 
(doesn't touch view-root etc.)

Everyone using the PDF Maker on View 1.3 should update to this version, 
as previous ones contained bugs.

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.)

I would want those things as a layer above pdf maker

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?

just typeset the first paragraph with the total-fit algo and actual 
font metrics. now i just add some page breaking (first fit), add 
the pdf file output from previous version, and i've got an alpha 
to test. :) (i'll be on vacation next week so this probably means 
the alpha will be available after that)

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)

hmm, looked at PDF, what is special about two columns output? :-) 
Disclaimer - I know completly nothing about what typesetting is, 
so bear with me please :-)

pdf maker - you have had to specify exactly where the text went.

Now pdf-maker2 appears you to allow text to flow from one place to 
another .. which is important if you don't know how much text you 
are starting with.

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.

Not sure .. I think I would want to see it at the pdf-maker level

that means the pdf maker has to be aware of the language of any paragraph 
(or part of paragraph) and so on.

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.

anyone interested in writing the user documentation for the pdf maker 
2?

sure, but it would require that I know something about pdf maker 
2, wouldn't it? :-)

do you want it to be based on the PDF Maker 1 docs?

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.

iirc underline is not supported directly by PDF, but the new typesetter 
could probably add that. not high pri right now (although qml will 
need it - actually, it'll need strikethrough)

pdf-maker does layers?

pdf-maker updated (docs almost finished)

new update. (notice that it produces funny results now in test.pdf, 
but this is only temporary). can now typeset lines of variable height.

new update - can now set fonts. (test.pdf now even more funny ;)

new update - check out test.pdf ;)

new update - now uses the total-fit algorithm for page breaking too. 
(major improvement wrt TeX). only works if columns have the same 
width (so there's no example of it in test.pdf yet)

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)

pdf maker can't do this, because manual intervention is in general 
not desirable. (i.e. an app that uses the pdf maker to produce invoices 
should not expect the user to manually fix the layout if there are 
problems)

Does REBOL have to support unicode before PDF-Maker can support unicode?

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.

Any chance of being able to create pdf forms ?

There is nothing wrong with Adobe PDF imo ...

I want to use REBOL web server to take a tex file, and spit out pdf 
using pdflatex.  Anyone suggest a suitable server?  Cal's ? Others 
?

Trying out Cal's version .. need to define "pdf" "application/pdf" 
so it displays those.

So, to render PDF, I do this

write %/d/rebol/rebgui/www/referral.tex tmp
either zero? ret: call/wait "d:\rebol\rebgui\www\pdflatex.bat" [
            browse/only http://127.0.0.1:8001/referral.pdf
][

            alert join "Failed to print.  Batch file failed with return code 
            of " ret
]

and pdflatex.bat is just

copy referral.tex c:\texmf\
c:
cd \texmf\
pdflatex referral.tex -output-directory=d:\rebol\rebgui\www\

Because if I just browse to the pdf, Acrobat locks the file which 
prevents me from rewriting the file.  This way, I can rewrite, and 
Acrobat reloads it.  Also I avoid writing lots of temporary files 
if I were to change the file name to bypass Acrobat file locking.

Hello, for french people : the french translation of Core User Guide 
is finished. You could find it on the Rebol Documentation Project 
: http://www.rebdocproj.org/article.php3?id_article=197, in PDF 
version.

Same in french / Le même en français : la traduction française du 
User Guide de REBOL Core est terminée. Elle est disponible sur le 
site du Rebol Documentation Project http://www.rebdocproj.org/article.php3?id_article=197, 
en version PDF. Enjoy !

imo every novice will go into the same kind of trouble with references 
issue .... but iirc Core docs in pdf explained it even graphically, 
so I would urge novices to learn those facts first ...