From: Dom Lachowicz (domlachowicz@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Feb 06 2003 - 17:50:10 EST
> > At the moment these are your only alternatives.
>
> It amazes me that nobody has identified this need
> and filled it yet.
Many have identified this need. It's a difficult and
problematic problem space, and one that Adobe is very
fierce about protecting, traditionally.
> > Importing PDF will be no small feat.
>
> You think? There are already lots of way to render
> PDF. Acrobat
> itself will produce a PS file from the PDF, which
> could then be read
> by Ghostscript to produce some importable format
> such as png, or tiff,
> etc. Or GS could be used directly on the PDF,
> although my experience
> with it is that it's not quite perfect yet.
Well, considering my last job was www.appligent.com
and I'm currently doing contract work for
www.pdfsages.com, I think I know a bit about the
topic.
Rasterizing the PDF to a PNG, and then importing the
PNG is *trivial*. Getting meaningful structured layout
out of a PDF's contents is much much harder (i.e.
fonts, text, images, etc...). Sending PNGs to your
printer sucks. PNGs of text is also a sub-optimal
model for a word-processor to follow. A word-processor
is a much different beast than a "typewriter with a
monitor" model you've used.
Dom
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Thu Feb 06 2003 - 17:53:46 EST