Clickable links in PDF? Metadata?

David Kastrup <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.lib.cairo
Organization Organization?!?
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Hi,

I'm currently taking a look at the suitability of using Cairo for the
rendering purposes of GNU LilyPond <URL:http://www.lilypond.org>.
Hardly surprising, print output is pretty much a priority.

There are a few loose ends for which I see nothing in the
documentation.  With regard to PDF production, I cannot find the
following two items:

a) clickable links
b) document metadata
c) interfacing with the PDF production

While one can write out (sub-)surfaces via a streaming interface, it is
not clear whether one can assemble a single PDF file from multiple
surfaces such that resources are only present once, and how one would
otherwise organize the PDF output such that user-defined elements can be
spliced in.  If c) was reasonably available and powerful, the other
points could be implemented as user-defined extensions.

Even if it seems like overkill to render every item with a clickable
link in a surface of its own.

There is also stuff like "attaching files" to a PDF (not as important).
It may be that this works with the MIME data extensions already.

Any further information about this stuff?  Present state, plans,
problems, possible interfaces/APIs, timelines, openness to third-party
contributions?

Oh, it also seems like surface types are hardcoded.  It might make sense
to let the user define a surface of his/her own by providing hooks for
_everything_.  For a vector-based format like PDF, this might be
reasonably straightforward and consequently a somewhat doable way of
getting a surface able to do everything that is required for a
particular application.

Thanks for any pointers/thoughts!

-- 
David Kastrup

-- 
cairo mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.cairographics.org/mailman/listinfo/cairo
lmpx.com only provides a reader for public news (NNTP) servers. It is not affiliated with the servers or forums shown here and is not responsible for the content of articles, which is written by their respective authors.