[pdftex] Acrobat 5.0 / consequences for pdftex

[Hans Hagen]

At 12:53 PM 4/7/01 -0400, Donald Story wrote:

>Also provided on this page are links to the new pdfmark Reference
>manual for Acrobat 5.0, to the adobe article on what new in the PDF
>Spec. 1.4.

I took a quick look to see what are the consequences for tex / pdftex: 

(1) JBIG2 compression 

for this pdftex needs an additonial graphics library, looks quite doable

(2) encryption

no real big new things, support depends on adding encryption to pdftex or not 

(3) adding language version to catalog

can be implemented by existing pdf primitives 

(4) included data 

simplified so already supported 

(5) procset resource

finaly this resource became obsolete, can become something 

 \pdfprocset{...}   % defaults to current proscet 

which when empty omits the entry. This save some bytes.

(6) graphics

not important 

(7) glyph width cmaps 

not so much a new feature, pdftex's hz previewing/printing may benefit from it

(8) output intents 

doable but also external app feature 

(9) new bookmark properties (color,font)

this joke can be supported by a (new) attr key/value to bookmarks [not sure
if this key is already there] 

(10) annotations

just extensions that can be handled already

(11) new javascript events 

new javascript specs not yet public, quite certainly doable within current
pdftex  

(12) forms (widget) extensions 

quite doable in existing framework [important extensions: submit forms as
xml, unicode support, fonts which is already supported but viewers were
never capable of handling it]

(13) referenced pdf 

can be handled by xform attr/res keys 

(14) natural language specs 

doable within pdftex  

(15) accessibility support 

looks doable with attr keys to primitives as well as literal pdf

(16) box defs for page 

can be handled by page attributes primitives 

(17) printermark annotation 

can be handled by annotation primitives  

(18) metadata xml streams 

doable with existing primitives 

(19) tagged pdf

looks doable, and is mostly a macro package dependent feature, i'm not sure
about the need to support is [mostly a html like thing] and i wonder if the
overhead is worth the effort; something like this was already possible with
marked content operators 

(20) transparancy 

looks doable, but i need a viewer to test it [gs is not yet bug free and
acro 5 is out of reach]

(--) So, to summarize: 

-- for pdftex: only the obsolete procset is of importance and maybe the att
key to bookmarks and the new image compression 
-- for tex macropackages: structuring may need to be supported, no big deal
but useless without apps using it
-- for pdf functionality: a couple of widget extensione, hopefully some
real interesting javascript extensions [currently most of it is not that
much needed for docs generated by tex] as well as a less buggy plug in [for
as far as can see the initialization issue is still not documented /
standardised]

So far, 

Hans  
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