Re: pdf libraries

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Friday 26 January 2007 11:41, Timoth=E9e Lecomte wrote:
> Ethan Merritt a =E9crit :
> >
> > What would be the state of UTF-8 support through such a path?
> > That is a big lack in PDFlib Lite.
> >  =20
> Well, I am not completely sure, but I would expect the text output to be=
=20
> the same as the one from the wxt terminal. Actually, fonts are more of a=
=20
> problem than encoding in my understanding of pdf.

I think the problem really is the encoding.  It's easy to specify
a font that contains a very large set of unicode glyphs, but PDFLib Lite
only allows you to select those glyphs that are indexed by a
single-byte coding table.  Full unicode table options, including UTF-8,
are only available in commercial versions of PDFLib.  Having the
glyphs in the font doesn't help if the encoding does not index them.

> > The other tricky bit is pattern-fill, but it's much less important.
> >
> As for pattern-fill, what are you afraid of ?

When I originally implemented pattern-fill in pdf.trm, I had to
try about 6 different ways of constructing the patterns before I
found a sequence of calls that worked.  The routines provided=20
by the PDF library did not parallel the PostScript routines as
closely as I would have expected.  It worked in the end, but
it was a bit tricky to find the right calls.