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

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ken wrote:

> The applications supported by Adobe often include some kind of scripting
> and in these cases the print stream can be decorated with pdfamrk
> operations which add metadata to the final PDF.

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.  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

transparency
text underneath (or whatever)
opaque stencil

So that the postscript limitations are hidden.

>
> Ghostscript supports transparency in PostScritp by a series of
> extensions, specifically to allow printing of transparent PDF files. So
> if you can find out how the Acrobat program extensions are dealing with
> transparency in the source application, and feel like doing a little
> programming, you can probably duplicate the effect.

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.  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?

I know how to do something similar using Tracker software's PDF Xchange 
viewer

http://www.tracker-software.com/forum3/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=10308&p=47138&hilit=mathog#p47104

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?

Thanks,

David Mathog

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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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