Re: [pdf-devel] First post to GNU PDF list..

[jemarch]

   I just wanted to say 'hi' to the people on this list. It's interesting
   that you seem to be developing a PDF program. I say that from the
   experience of having spent some years now thinking about exactly that
   problem. In this time, between working and learning about other
   systems, I have come upon several interesting things, which you may or
   may not have come across before.

Hello and welcome :)

   Firstly, I believe that PDFs should be minimal (or MINIM in my
   syntax). Now, of course, this seems slightly obvious to many people,
   but what I mean is that PDFs exist in an interpreted environment, and
   because most of the time we are talking about using standard English
   (or USian) fonts - then we can simply inherit from the OS or the
   interpreter. (Actually, this behaviour is exactly the one that I make
   use of - when writing my own PDFs (which can be interpreted by Adobe
   Acrobat)).


The PDF specification defines several standard fonts that any PDF
consumer application should be able to provide (directly or indirectly
using the operating system). Any extra fonts used by the document can
be embedded inside the document.


   __Files or Objects - what is the *proper* way to view a PDF?__
   Now, after playing around with the concept for a while, I started
   thinking about different transforms one *should* be able to perform on
   a PDF. They involve, for example, seeing all filesystems as just as
   pretend as each other, and that one ought therefore be able to `mount'
   a PDF. Such filesystem access would be useful from the perspective of
   people with, say, a specific piece of data, maybe a paragraph in a
   letter that they're quoting, to be able to quote that adequately using
   only a number of simple steps. Presenting to the user as a filesystem,
   we could then use our standard tools to manipulate the document for
   such editing tasks. (Well, I need to learn more programming to make
   them effective, so maybe you might make them first. Anyway, that's my
   $0.02).

This is interesting. Having libgnupdf would be quite funny to write
such a thing as a Hurd translator :)

--
José E. Marchesi  <address@hidden>

GNU Project       http://www.gnu.org
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