[pdftex] How to covert pdf file into latex file?

[jonathan d p ferguson]

On Jul 12, 2006, at 7:36 PM, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:

>>>>>> "John" == John R Culleton <john at wexfordpress.com> writes:
>
>> And I know of no one who has even attempted this kind of reverse
>> engineering on a pdf file.
>
> Why do you want to reverse engineer anything while it is very well
> documented?
>

AFAIK, while the PDF standard is well documented, in order to turn it  
back into a source format, one would need to know first the stream- 
markup of an InDesign, Quark, Illustrator, or pdfeTeX file, and  
second, the source format codes explicitly stored in the PDF. For  
example, when one saves an Illustrator file as PDF, one can check  
"Preserve Illustrator editing capability" for the PDF file. Doing so  
encapsulates the Illustrator file in the PDF file as a stream (or set  
of streams).

This leads to a curious question:

Could one tell pdfeTeX to encapsulate the *TeX source? If so, how?

 From the pdfTeX documentation (pdftex-a.pdf) and some simple  
sleuthing about with Illustrator PDF saves,
I see that the way to encapsulate would be some invocation of

\pdfobj [object type spec]
	I suppose using the "file" attr against the *TeX source file(s), say  
"\pdfobj [file] Source.tex"?
	Can anyone provide a verbatim example of how to do this? I'm not  
having great luck with it.

However, supposing one were to put the *TeX sources into a PDF  
stream, how would one extract that stream back into human-readable  
form? Can pdfeTeX do it (I doubt it, but I thought I'd ask)?

have a nice day.yad
jdpf