Re: Save as PDF

Hi Steve,
> one, I would really prefer to see a common approach
> across all platforms
> if possible. It could turn into a mess to use

That's a reasonable request, but unlikely to happen
before our 2.4 release. We could use something like
Panda PDF (http://www.stillhq.com//panda/).

> 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

That's patently false. Printing is by its nature a
vector-based process. The PDFs that we produce via
"printing" the doc are 100% scalable WYSIWYG
equivalents of what you'd see on-screen. We do lose
things like hyperlinks in the process, but that's not
*too* bad.

Things go wrong when you *don't* use a printing-based
solution to render a PDF, because then you'd need a
custom layout/rendering solution to generate the PDF.
PDFs don't have any semantic structure to them. No
paragraphs, sections, wrapping primitives, etc.

I speak from some experience on this, having worked on
both GnomePrint and in a previous job
(www.appligent.com).

Hub/FJF, if you'd like to do the same for Mac OSX,
that'd be great. I'll remove the PostScript exporter
from the list.

Best,
Dom

                
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Received on Fri Aug 5 14:26:08 2005