Displaying PDF files in an LC stack

Francis Nugent Dixon effendi at wanadoo.fr
Mon Mar 26 12:31:28 EDT 2012


Hi from Beautiful Brittany,

For Pete, Michael, Colin ..... et alia !

I think we have been down this road before !

This is not a completely internal display of
pdf files within a LiveCode stack, but it's the
closest I could get, and it solves all my needs.

I have a library of pdf files. I have a LiveCode
stack containing a card for each of the files
I may want to display. On each card, I have

1 - The pdf file name within my library,
2 - A display scale value for the pdf file,
3 - a field containing a list of page numbers
      that may interest me, within the pdf file.

I select the scale, select a page number and
"open" the pdf file, at a specific page, in an
external window, by building an applescript file
to call the Skim app with the required parameters.

Warning : Skim is for Macs only ... Life is so hard !

NOTE : I have not exploited the potential of all
possible parameters which can be passed to Skim.

I also found out that if my pdf file originated as a text
file (first-hand), then I could eventually dig out the text,
(which means that pdf display COULD be pure LiveCode)
but if the pdf file was built (for example) by conversion
from a jpg file, then I could NEVER recover the text.
(that seems pretty reasonable, does it not ?)

Catch me off-forum, and I can send you an
example stack.

Best Regards

-Francis

"Nothing should ever be done for the first time !"




More information about the use-livecode mailing list