Re: Generating PDFs with Ada

["Elias Salomão Helou Neto" <eshneto@gmail.com>]

<eshn...@gmail.com> a écrit:
> > Now, for automatic document generation, both from practical and

> I understand the advocacy, but you still need a source for the document.  PDFis not a source, and TeX/LaTeX are neither good for that purpose (no  
> more than RTF is), added the already pointed fact of lack of real support  
> for Unicode (unless you use the 1GB install of an application I forget the  
> name) which is a must-have for many text based work (especially if you  
> need multiple languages in the same document, like Arabic + French,  
> Japanese + Italian, and so on). This is not readable neither.

You are right. In fact, .rtf is a better source in most cases, since
we can't hope to have a secretary who knows TeX. But I meant that in
the context of an automatic generated intermediate format.

> Better XML as source than TeX/LaTex there. Some document model exist for  

I know very much about TeX and very little about XML. If you know
equally well about both then you may be right. Just wondering if
you're not saying that only because you know XML better than TeX.

> About MS Office document in administrations, at least in france,PDFis  
> every where. I receive e-mail bills inPDF, and all official documents you  
> can order on-line on administration's web sites, arePDF(do not know for  
> other countries, while pretty sure it's the same in all of the Europe).

Congratulations to French people. I'm at Brazil and .doc is
everywhere. I don't care how the document is generated, but how it is
exchanged. Why not convert the stuff into a PDF so that everyone can
read it?

> AboutPDFnow: I remember when it appears in the 199Xs, this was an ogre,  
> consuming too much CPU power and memory. This was best used for printing  
> than for on-screen reading (the HD was scrapping and grinding as much as  
> you were scrolling your document).

This was likely an implementation issue. PDF documents have a
precisely located object table, which contains the position of every
object in the file and the format is page based. When you jump to a
page it does not need to read the hole stuff to render it. It is in
contrast with PostScript, which does require everything to be rendered
from the beginning of the document. Still, by that time, PS renderers
were faster than their PDF counterparts.

Elias.