Sudoku PDF Printer Showdown

[Michael Wiktowy]

On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 2:21 PM, chasd <chasd at silveroaks.com> wrote:
>> *Tools used*:
>>
>> • gnome-games.i386 1:2.22.1.1-5.fc9
>> • cups-pdf.i386 2.4.7-1.fc9
>> • cairo.i386 1.6.4-1.fc9
>> • evince.i386 2.22.1.1-1.fc9
>> • AdobeReader_enu.i486 8.1.2-1
>> • inkscape.i386 0.46-2.fc9
>> • selinux-policy.noarch 3.3.1-55.fc9 (this will make sense later)
>
> From your tools list, it would be better to create them with InkScape to
> begin with, and bypass PDF.
> A PDF is not considered an editable format, even though there are tools that
> allow it.
> Editing PDFs gets messy quickly.

Thanks for the feedback.

Well ... there are times when all you have is a PDF as the source
material to work from. So it is certainly nice to have the refined
tools to dig into the contents and modify things. But as I am trying
to illustrate with this simple example, the PDF generation that is
available to all apps that can print has some issues also.

There is also a bit of a correction. I mistakenly thought that
gnome-print uses cairo as a backend to generate PDFs. From what I
understand now, it does it all itself internally so blame or praise in
my test was falsely placed on cairo and should be on gnome-print. I
guess I have to read more about how all the pieces fit together ...

> This is configurable in /etc/cups/cups-pdf.conf
> There are several options there which could solve the issues of where the
> file is written, the user that writes it ( not sure about context ), and the
> filename.

Thanks ... I'll take a look.

>> • Imports incorrectly in Inkscape
>
> InkScape just got PDF editing support, it isn't going to be as good as Adobe
> Acrobat.

No doubt. I found that Inkscape does an excellent job as a first
iteration though and was hoping to point out some places it doesn't. I
have a personal project underway that is taking PDFs and adding
editable PDF form fields on top. I have found that using Inkscape to
convert the PDF pages to SVGs and import those into Scribus where I
can add the form fields and some simple javascript gives OK results.
The SVG font translation into Scribus 1.3.4 is not so stellar though.
I am hoping that 1.3.5 is better.

>> • multiple of binary streams when viewed in text editor
>
> A valid PDF can be binary encoded. You may not want that, but it is valid to
> the specs.
> Also note that a valid PDF can have edits appended to the end of the file
> that over-ride something in the body, and there is a checksum involved so a
> parser knows it got all the data, you can't just "cat foo >> bar.pdf" and
> have it work. A PDF may look like a simple ASCII-based format ( sometimes
> anyway ), but it much more complicated than that.

Doing the overlay/substitution thing is more appropriate in many
situations but not all. Xournal does this quite nicely with its PDF
Annotation functionality. I wish I could do this also with Scribus in
my project described above as I am simply adding new content but the
importing of PDFs in Scribus is .... marginal.

However, you are always increasing the file size this way and
increasing the rendering time.

>> Printing with Ideal Fictional Dream PDF Printer:
>
> Print to SVG or the PDF-Mars format instead.
> <http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/mars/>
> Mars uses XML as the file format for PDF instead of the traditional PDF
> gorp. The Mars file format uses the "zip-it-up" ODT format, and has
> everything described as XML referencing each page as an SVG. Although there
> are few Mars tools available right now ;)

That would be the problem. Is there a package in the Fedora distro
that will enable a "Print to SVG" option?

/Mike