Re: Generating PDFs with Ada

["Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)" <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr>]

Le Sun, 16 Jan 2011 03:49:09 +0100, Elias Salomão Helou Neto  
<eshneto@gmail.com> a écrit:
> 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.

You could know easily (about XML), as that is rather simple: that's a  
standard serialization format. About document models description, there  
are multiple standards (and may be local standard, like me, I use my own),  
each with a particular strength

I know a bit about TeX and derivative (mainly LaTeX). Sure you know it far  
more than me.

> 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.
Did not knew that. Thanks for the historical point.

Time to say there is something I miss in PDF: the ability to link to a  
particular part of a document from the outside. HTML and the likes have  
identifiers (which can identify a part of a document) which you can link  
to using URL fragments (you know, the “#any-identifier” at the end of some  
URLs).

As explained in another reply to this thread, I am seeking for a standard  
convention, which could among other things, be used to write in comment  
and interpreted by IDE and editors, to link to others source files or  
related documents. But if you cannot link directly to a particular part of  
a document, that is painful if ever the document is big enough.

Think about the Ada reference, which is a rather big document. From time  
to time, you may see replies in this Usenet, with a link to a section of  
the standard, and many time to a particular point of a section. All these  
links are to HTML version of the reference. You cannot link this way to a  
PDF version of the standard, and that is what is missing to these formats,  
which I believe are better suited for printing than for what we could  
expect in a computer environment.

-- 
Si les chats miaulent et font autant de vocalises bizarres, c’est pas pour  
les chiens.

“I am fluent in ASCII” [Warren 2010]