[open-beos-printing] Re: Open Tasks for PDF Writer

> Here is an incomplete list of open tasks:
> 1. bitmap creation for colorspace != B_ARGB32
> 2. Type1 identification
> 3. alpha channel support
> 4. pattern
> 5. clip to inverse BPicture
> 6. clip to string
> 7. documentation

By 2. Type1 indentification, do you mean dynamic type1 fonts declaration to 
PDFlib? Like the stuff I'd for TrueType fonts file?
If that correct, I'll take this point 2.
BTW, I've already start... need to fix a segfault bug ;-)

> 1, 2, 6 should be easy to implement;

Well, point 7 too! :-)

> 3 is supported by PDF 1.4 but not by PDFlib; temporary solution
> could be to render an entire page into a bitmap (or slices..) if we
> want to support it now; I vote against it or at least I will not 
> implement it

I'll vote against too.
We could wait PDFlib add support to this feature of PDF 1.4.
*Or*, we could hack something, like dithering the alpha channel into a binary 
mask. Uh. 

> 4 is supported by PDFlib and probably also by xpdf/BePDF
> 5 I have no solution for that
> 
> Who wants to do what?

I'm taking point 2.
Okay, give me this point 1 too, bitmaps are fun and I've some experience since 
bubblejet rasterization engine! ;-)

> I could do 1, 2, 4 and 6, but I can only contribute to this project 
> until the end of this month and have to postpone all my open source 
> activities until later this year.

I (we) perfectly understand. As main contributor to this project, you're the 
best PDF features aware member of the team: /me think it's better if you focus 
on point 4 and 6, which, for one at least, don't really know how to implement.

On same topic, what about a v0.5 release on BeBits?

Philippe.

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