Re: [Swftools-common] Patch for pdf2swf (CID codemap file options)

[Moriyoshi Koizumi]

On 2004/10/24, at 3:25, Matthias Kramm wrote:
> > Actually I'm not willing to type somewhat enigmatic parameter sequence
> > every time. It was just a kind of workaround, because I didn't think
> > it was a good idea to drastically change the codes related to one
> > feature in a mere tiny patch, XPDF part in particular as 
> > heavy-alteration of
> > an embedded package might often cause synchronisation problem in the
> > future.
>
> It's not that bad. There are quite a number of changes by now anyway
> which have to be applied every time the xpdf package in swftools is
> upgraded.

Um, I didn't know that. It is just what I learned from my little
experience in some opensource projects.

> > The situation is a bit more complicated; a PDF isn't always written 
> > in a
> > single language and we can't tell which language it is written :)
> Are you saying that you need to use the "right" languagepack for
> every PDF, but can't have more than one around?
> Or would you also be able to just include *all* languagepacks, and 
> then be
> able to convert every PDF, no matter the language?

The "language pack" idea of the XPDF distribution is not quite an idea 
of
PDF itself; I suppose they are provided just for convenience, so that 
users
can download as many CMAP / ToUnicode files as they need to display a 
PDF in
question.

> > A feasible way is rewrite the GlobalParams.cc to search for an
> > individual parameter file in each NLS directory, which may be put in
> > /usr/local/share/swftools/encodings or whatever. This way the 
> > necessary
> > files would be automatically collected at runtime and then all users
> > have to
> > do when they want to use misc. languages should be to extract the
> > archive
> > in that directory.
>
> Ok- I renamed the xpdfrc config files now anyway.
> Config files now processed are:
>
> /etc/pdf2swf.conf
> $HOME/.pdf2swf.conf
>
> So if you're o.k. with putting the languagepack parameters into, say,
> ~/.pdf2swf.conf, we wouldn't need any other changes to pdf2swf.
> (Probably the only way to beat that approach in terms of convenience
>  would be to introduce a --languagepack option to pdf2swf which you can
>  point directly to the .tar.gz file you downloaded from the xpdf
>  download page ;))

Things didn't go exactly the way I said :) To resummerise my idea, it
should be like the following:

- Suppose each "language pack" is installed in a separate directory in
  /usr/local/swftools/encodings, with the directory named its language
  name for example (e.g. /usr/local/swftools/encodings/japanese/).

- On startup, xpdf2swf seeks per-directory configuration files
  that are named by a certain rule in the subdirectories of
  /usr/local/swftools/encodings. For instance, if there are two
  directories in /usr/local/swftools/encodings,

    /usr/local/swftools/encodings/japanese
    and
    /usr/local/swftools/encodings/chinese-simplified

  then

    /usr/local/swftools/encodings/japanese/xpdf2swfrc
    and
    /usr/local/swftools/encodings/chinese-simplified/xpdf2swfrc

  will be looked up in this scheme.

- they will all be concatenated and parsed at end of the startup
  phase, whose settings are possibly overridden by the command
  line parameters.

Regards,
Moriyoshi