Re: The PDF back end

[Valeriy E. Ushakov]

On Wed, May 16, 2001 at 22:38:46 +0200, address@hidden wrote:

> Perhaps now is the time to start transitioning to a new model

That's a *big* project.  That's, also - quite interesting project.


> I am also wondering what great new features we can expect besides
> bug fixes, once you get rid of this PDF 'burden'. A lot of work
> has been put in this back end, and dropping it would make all
> that work meaningless.

Well, unless changes to Lout core thoroughly break PDF backend, I
think that dropping it gains nothing.

As far as "great new features" are concerned... Off the top of my
head:

. extend @IncludeGraphics to understand binary EPS files (quite easy).


. extend @IncludeGraphics to support other image formats, introduce,
  say, @FileFormat paramter to that one can say:

    @IncludeGraphics @FileFormat { JPEG } { logo.jpg }

  That's a bigger project, but not too much tied to Lout internals 


. update PDF backend to handle glyph composition (should be more or
  less straightforward).


. font embedding for PDF backend (I have draft code that handles PDF
  details, need some work to collect more info from the font itself -
  shouldn't be hard).

Any takers???

SY, Uwe
-- 
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