[posting this on ilug-d as wekk, for the benefit of our brethren...]
On Saturday 05 April 2003 02:28 am, you wrote:
> > good question. sadly, you don't really get professional-grade and
> > feature-rich pdf creators under gnulinux for the moment. you could do
> > some smart searching at pdfzone.com and planetpdf.com and lemme know the
>
> results.
> I won't contest the feature rich part of your post. But using TeX and
> outputing to PDF, you can get professional results. You can get a lot of
> front ends for TeX/LaTeX under Linux.
ambar, feature-rich, and professional quality, are two different issues. in
PDF, we use a term called 'fidelity' to the original. using most tools for
creating PDFs, you get 'high-fidelity' pdf documents, with images, text,
typography, etc. all intact and ready for any platform, any printer, and
other stuff.
when i use the term professional, i mean for pre-press. which is where PDF
was initially targetted as well. in this segment, PDFs made under GNuLinux
usually conform to PDF-X3, which is what LaTeX, and Scribus handle. this
means, the files are read for pre-press, but color images will not have color
management system features and profiles. this is quite a complicated science
and needs lots of care.
feature-rich is the third aspect of PDF. can you embed voice annotations,
highlight text, extract graphics, draw doodles, sign digitally, use
electronic stamps like 'approved' 'confidential' , insert text articles, make
notes, put sticky notes, insert hypertext links, create forms, run
sophisticated javascripts, create page transition effects and slide
presentations, sort by authors of notes, make bookmarks, create automatic
index, catalogs, do automatic scan-toOCR in a hidden layer, even read the
text out in synethised speech?
we don't seem to have a tool under GnuLinux that allows us to create such
'feature-rich' pdf files.
we don't have tools under GnuLinux that allow us to create 'professional for
pre-press' PDF files with halftone data, color profiles, separations-testing,
verification, and creation tools, separations to composite tools, and loads
of other nitty gritty that make pdf the industry standard in pre-press.
and here is where i use the key operative word: "Y E T".
[yeah!}
:-)
For XSL-FO you will have to create
> stylesheets by hand, but once you can do it, it can be quite powerful. I
> have used FOP and XSL-FO to get professional quality PDF files that if done
> properly look great.
this stuff is good, perhaps you could give a small talk on this at the april
20th meet of ilug-d.
please do so, will be really nice.
:-)
LL
>
> Ambar
================================================
To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe in subject header.
Check archives at http://www.mail-archive.com/ilugd%40wpaa.org
