[pdftex] Indirect references to pages

[Hans Hagen]

At 09:25 14/07/2003 -0500, story at uakron.edu wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>Does pdftex have a primitive fo obtaining an indirect reference to a page?
>  This is needed for GoTo actions for jumping to a particular page in the
>current document.
>
>Distiller has {PageN}, dvipdfm has @pageN. Has this capability been added
>to pdftex in recent years?

since this is indeed needed for some more advanced pdf features, it has 
been discussed and put on the todo list (there have been some experiments 
with this); possible solutions are:

- reserve a number of objects that matches the number of pages (this needs 
to be set beforehand based on a first pass)
- keep an internal list of indirect objects + primitive like \pdfpageobj 
<number> (can be tricky for more complex situations)
- provide \pdflastpageobj during shipout which can then be written to a 
file (takes quite some hash space in big docs)

the first method is probably the most simple one (since one can reserve 
more numbers than needed) because most job sare multipass

Hans
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