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Re: How does Adobe add PDF generation within word, powerpoint, etc. on Windows?

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In article <j79n69$iq8$1@dont-email.me>, dmathog@gmail.com says...

> Ah, now we are getting somewhere.  When one "prints" through the adobe 
> driver on a multipage document the first thing it does is scan through 
> all the pages, and only after that completes does it enter what looks 
> like a typical printer status window.  I'm guessing that in the first 
> pass they are using scripts to find all the bits and pieces which need 
> to be pdfmarks.

That's certinaly how it used to work, it identifies headers and footers, 
page breaks and 'stuff' to build bookmarks and things.

>  Seems a might tricky though, since the underlying 
> application is still going to see a postscript printer, and will 
> presumably do things to emulate transparency there too.  That is, like 
> breaking the transparency up into pixels, some absent, some opaque.  So 
> I guess possibly the pdfmark is something like, top to bottom

I don't know, I'm only speculating, but PostScript really can't deal 
with transparency.

 
> Well, for the sake of argument, lets assume there exists a script that 
> can be run withing Word/Powerpoint that creates a list of pdfmarks in 
> whatever format ghostscript wants.

pdfmarks are standard, there's an Adobe document describing them.

>  Is there a way to instruct a 
> postscript printer (via PDFcreator and any of the others) to merge the 
> stream from the program with the file from the script?

No, that's not the way it works. You need to put the pdfmark inside the 
PostScript program, at the correct point. The macros used to (I don;t 
kow what they do now) use the 'PostScript pass-through' mechanism to 
insert the pdfmark operations at the correct point while hte page is 
being printed (to PostScript).


> but not how to do this sort of thing with ghostscript.  In fact, why 
> don't we start with that example, which is a method for moving comments 
> from the PPT to the PDF.  It creates and xfdf format file which can be
> layered over the PDF.  Can ghostscript do the same thing?

No, because the pdfmarks have to come from the originating application, 
so this isn't a Ghostscript problem. 

If you can insert the relevant pdfmark into the PostScript stream, then 
Ghostscript can (up to a point) deal with it when creating a PDF file. 
Not all pdfmarks are supported by pdfwrite though.

So the problem is getting the relevant pdfmark operations emitted, not 
telling Ghostscript to do something special.


			Ken

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How does Adobe add PDF generation within word, powerpoint, etc. on Windows? mathog <dmathog@gmail.com> - 2011-10-12 12:16 -0700
  Re: How does Adobe add PDF generation within word, powerpoint, etc. on Windows? ken <ken@spamcop.net> - 2011-10-13 07:59 +0100
    Re: How does Adobe add PDF generation within word, powerpoint, etc. on Windows? mathog <dmathog@gmail.com> - 2011-10-14 09:14 -0700
      Re: How does Adobe add PDF generation within word, powerpoint, etc. on Windows? ken <ken@spamcop.net> - 2011-10-14 17:43 +0100
        Re: How does Adobe add PDF generation within word, powerpoint, etc. on Windows? mathog <dmathog@gmail.com> - 2011-10-14 14:24 -0700
          Re: How does Adobe add PDF generation within word, powerpoint, etc. on Windows? Matti Vuori <xmvuori@kolumbus.fi> - 2011-10-16 15:23 +0000
  Re: How does Adobe add PDF generation within word, powerpoint, etc. on Windows? tlvp <mPiOsUcB.EtLlLvEp@att.net> - 2011-10-13 12:51 -0400

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