In the end, you need to have bitmaps for the screen.
Rendering is the projection of vectors onto pixels.
But you don't want to lose the vectors, because you need them for interactions
(mouse, keyboard focus).
I think that it is extremely sexy to have an interactive viewer for PDF!
Writing a renderer is a lot of work, although the newer Windows and Apple APIs
make it a lot easier nowadays.
Still, you need to have an answer to color composition and irregular clipping
paths (the hardest problems I think of. But there may be more).
And it must be fast enough for interactive applications...
I was hoping to use some existing renderer. I imagine that Bens approach can
work well.
Although I didn’t do anything towards rendering myself, I am thinking of using
PDF.js in an embedded browser.
PDF.js is used by many browsers and seems to be good enough by now.
And it would be not too bad to fiddle with JavaScript to connect it with the
model in Smalltalk, I guess.
The problem is the browser embedding. Is this feasible in Pharo?
Happy hacking,
Christian
> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: Pharo-users [mailto:pharo-users-boun...@lists.pharo.org] Im Auftrag
> von K K Subbu
> Gesendet: Dienstag, 14. November 2017 06:43
> An: Ben Coman <b...@openinworld.com>
> Cc: Any question about pharo is welcome <pharo-users@lists.pharo.org>
> Betreff: Re: [Pharo-users] Embedded PDF viewer?
>
> On Monday 13 November 2017 05:29 PM, Ben Coman wrote:
> > Yes, I've certainly considered it. Pragmatically, in my electrical
> > career I deal with a lot of single page A3 PDF scans of schematic
> > drawings, so pre-converting to a bitmap format outside of Pharo
> > wouldn't lose much.
>
> PDF deals with vector graphics, so bitmap conversion will be lossy. You could
> import them as SVG instead use the existing classes for handling SVG and
> XML.
>
> HTH .. Subbu
