[cairo-bugs] [Bug 23170] It's better to add an option to generate uncompressed content for PDF.

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23170





--- Comment #2 from Adrian Johnson <ajohnson at redneon.com>  2009-09-21 04:37:59 PST ---
> (In reply to comment #0)
> In cairo-pdf-surface.c, I found more hard coded code for "compressed"
> parameter, such as Line 1386, 1496, 1504, 1755, 3012, 3181, 3336. I suggest
> replacing these hard coded "TRUE" or "FALSE" by an internal variable.

The "hard coded" booleans are for binary data such as images and fonts. I only
made the compress_content variable control the compression of the human
readable parts (ie the content stream) for debugging purposes. I was not aware
of any PDF consumers that can not handle any compression.

> Then we
> can add one public API to set this internal variable. The new API may looks
> like follows.
> cairo_public void 
> cairo_surface_set_PDF_compressed (cairo_surface_t *surface, bool compressed);

There is a lot of resistance to adding APIs for controlling the non graphics
related capabilities of backends. See for example this thread:

  http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/cairo/2006-September/007956.html

The current proposals/ideas for solving this are:

- Provide a CAIRO_DEBUG environment variable that can be used for controlling
debugging options such as compression, fallback images and printing backtraces.

    http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/cairo/2008-April/013797.html
    http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/cairo/2008-May/014059.html

  I'm not sure what the current status of this is.

- Providing a generic PDF API for inserting objects and/or obtaining only the
content stream. An external library will use this API to provide control over
all the non graphics related parts of the PDF specification such as hyperlinks,
encryption, compression etc.

  This is something I'm slowly working on.

> Since our application needs uncompressed PDF output, it would be appreciated if
> the API above can be added to later versions of cairo.

Another option is to use pdftk to uncompress the PDF.


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