World: r3wp

this question might not entirely be related to PDF Maker, but I had 
an idea of using Pages for MacOSX to create pretty PDF documents 
with areas where text can be put in by a separate program and then 
create a new PDF (not X-Forms) for printing. This would require the 
ability to search/replace text in PDFs. Is this possible with compressed 
PDFs?

you have to parse it out and rebuild it. (or at least recreate some 
objects and append them as a change, but then you have both the original 
and the new version in the file)

no easy task it seems...

just typeset the first paragraph with the total-fit algo and actual 
font metrics. now i just add some page breaking (first fit), add 
the pdf file output from previous version, and i've got an alpha 
to test. :) (i'll be on vacation next week so this probably means 
the alpha will be available after that)

if you want to play (at your own risk! it still does nothing useful), 
http://www.colellachiara.com/soft/PDFM2/

(note, i'll be doing more changes during the afternoon)

there is so many MLs around, that one starts to lose himself in the 
current situation :-)

the pdf maker is not a markup language :) it's a (rather low level) 
dialect. you generally want to hook up higher level mls to it (like 
makedoc and qml)

what is wetan then (or what was the name)? :-)

wetan is an emitter for makedoc. so the ml is still makedoc basically 
:)

first results of the typesetter: http://www.colellachiara.com/soft/PDFM2/test.pdf

Looks good.

Yep, looks good.

I don't have anything to say, so I'm just going to agree with Volker 
and Anton :-)

hmm, looked at PDF, what is special about two columns output? :-) 
Disclaimer - I know completly nothing about what typesetting is, 
so bear with me please :-)

pdf maker - you have had to specify exactly where the text went.

Now pdf-maker2 appears you to allow text to flow from one place to 
another .. which is important if you don't know how much text you 
are starting with.

the example is also showing full justification, and hyphenation which 
is new.

what we also need to see is different font styles within the columns 
of text.

while still preserving justification and hyphenation, and text flow

what is hyphenation, please? division of words at the end of line?

to insert a hyphen into a word to split the word up

eg hyphen-ation

ok, thanks :-)

graham: i'm not using a dictionary, and i'm not sure i want to do 
that in the pdf maker. i think it's more low level than that. otoh, 
doing so could provide some optimization (don't hypenate if it's 
not needed, like TeX does), so i'm not completely against it.

currently you insert soft-hypens in the dialect and the typesetter 
decides if it should use it or not.

i'm going to play with the penalties and demerits for hypens to see 
if i can get a better output; however the columns in the test are 
pretty small so it's hard to get a good ouput anyway.

hyphenation dictionaries use small tables of characters to decide 
where to put the hyphens

also notice that the columns have a different width (i think TeX 
can't do this, not easily at least)

I noticed that.

i think TeX has a very good hypenation algorithm (at least it was 
the best at the time)

Yes, I'm using it

yet it's something for higher level dialects to do imho. i.e. makedoc 
would do that.

Not sure .. I think I would want to see it at the pdf-maker level

that means the pdf maker has to be aware of the language of any paragraph 
(or part of paragraph) and so on.

localised versions :)

imagine you want to typeset a sentence in english that quotes a sentence 
in italian...

or, if i ever get to support unicode, a sentence in english that 
quotes japanese.

i want this to stay at a upper layer. :) i will have to do it anyway 
- i'll have to do the pdf emitter for qml for e.g.

(and surely the md3 one)

winansiencoding does not have ligatures - too bad, so that'll need 
to wait for when i get to unicode. :(

anyone interested in writing the user documentation for the pdf maker 
2?

sure, but it would require that I know something about pdf maker 
2, wouldn't it? :-)

do you want it to be based on the PDF Maker 1 docs?

but what will we use ?

:)

Gabriele, it's pretty cool. Good reference, too.
Does underline not work yet ?

First thing I tried of course was bold, italic and underline. Sorry, 
I'll try to stick to positive comments.

henrik, you can know by reading the developer docs. but you will 
also make examples and explain it so that knowledge of the internals 
of pdfmaker is not necessary :)

e.g. http://www.colellachiara.com/soft/PDFM2/pdf-maker.html#section-3
gives a description of the dialect that you can base the user docs 
on.