Re: Save as PDF

Dom Lachowicz wrote:

>This is something that's been asked for a million
>times if it's been asked for once. The Unix build now
>has Save As->PDF and Save As->Postscript as export
>options. Since it's based around GnomePrint at the
>moment, it's Unix-only.
>
    I'm relatively new to this mailing list, so forgive me if this has
been brought up before. It's just that this discussion topic jumped off
the page at me, as I have been playing over the past week with the
Scintilla open-source text editing component, toward the possibility of
embedding it in another project I'm working on. Scintilla comes bundled
with the open-source "SciTE" text editor, which serves as a demo for the
component (and a pretty darn competitive alternative to the UltraEdit
editor that's been my favorite for years).

    SciTE has export functionality for several formats, notably (in this
case) PDF. The code implementing that export is completely
platform-neutral, supports multiple fonts and colors (for syntax
highlighting), and is just over 400 lines of code. There's no concept
of the table-based formatting that would be critical to supporting
Abiword documents, but I don't think it would be a CRAZY idea to give it
a look and see if there is potential there. It uses a permissive
license (Python), so GPL compatibility isn't an issue.

    I have two primary thoughts which lead me to mention this. Number
one, I would really prefer to see a common approach across all platforms
if possible. It could turn into a mess to use GnomePrint on Unix, try
to bundle in CutePDF or some other pseudo-printer solution for Win32,
and come up with still another hack for the next platform. Secondly,
you would probably get better-quality PDF's generating them from scratch
rather than "cheating" through a pseudo-printer solution. It's my
understanding that such print driver based solutions generate PDF's that
are bitmap-based... rather than containing raw text and formatting
instructions for Acrobat to parse. Bitmap-based PDF's are practically
useless for applications that import or modify PDF content, and make
Acrobat's text searching functionality much less reliable.

    Just to clarify, however... I'm not poo-pooing on Dom's proposal to
include GnomePrint-based PDF export functionality in the upcoming Unix
version. If there's a working solution, then by all means make it
available for that platform. I'm just throwing out ideas for the long term.

Steve

P.S. If you're interested in checking out that code, download the
tarball from "http://scintilla.sourceforge.net/SciTEDownload.html". The
code I'm talking about is in "src/Exporters.cxx".
Received on Fri Aug 5 06:30:53 2005