[pdftex] Forward looking object references

[Hans Hagen]

At 10:42 AM 3/23/2003 +0700, The Thanh Han wrote:

>On Fri, Mar 21, 2003 at 07:22:17PM -0500, Igor Khomyakov wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Thank you Hans, Sebastian, Klaus, and Laurent for your replies. In this
> > email I will try to justify/clarify the goal I am trying to achieve, and
> > provide some examples. I believe that this method will work nicely for PDF
> > output, and can be used successfully for wide range of applications (e.g.
> > number of total pages, table of contents, summary sections, etc.). I hope
> > that if nobody knows how to achieve this in existing version of pdfTeX, Han
> > (The Thanh) would pick it up, and tell us how it can be done, or whether
> > there is a chance this functionality will be included into future releases.
>
>that should not be hard to implement. Before I start doing it, I just want
>to ask whether someone else (Martin/Heiko/Fabrice) is considering doing
>it? If not I will give a try.

a rather simple solution could be to reserve a certain amount of slots for 
page objects; where previous viewers supported reference by page number, 
current versions only accept object references; in any way, it would be 
nice to have the page object number available on forehand:

after starting up pdftex : reserve object number for page 0 -> \pdflastpageref
after shipping out a page: reserve another object slot

(some xperimental code with regards to the page object has been implemented 
by martin already)

yet another object number related feature would be to have the possibility 
to overload an already shipped out object by using the version number part 
of the object ref (the second number). At the cost of some unused 
(overloaded) objects in the file, thi scoul dalso limit the number of 
passes needed sometimes.

Hans


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