"ouch: the beginning of the end"

[Monte Goulding]

> On 8 Mar 2017, at 10:59 pm, Mark Waddingham via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
> 
> - Option 1 - bi-level background images
> 
> Here I'm assuming that your original PDFs do not change that often and (given the
> requirements you have found out from the government department involved) the forms
> must be used as is. Thus, I presume any 'recurring sections' would need to be
> rendered on repeated images of the appropriate page rather than cutting up the
> original forms into pieces and just replicating those parts.
> 
> In this case, then pre-rendering all the pages as high-resolution black-and-white
> 1bpp bitmaps and then rendering those underneath the LiveCode fields is probably not
> that bad an option. Given that the average printer people will be using will probably
> only have a true black-and-white resolution of 300-600dpi and most printed forms are
> only about 5% black pixels you will get immensely high compression ratios. The only
> slight snafu here right now is that PDF printing support in LC does not yet exist
> for Android, and would need a small patch to pass PNG data straight through to the
> PDF (at present it only does this for JPEG). [ The reason PDF printing is not currently
> supported on Android is due to text rendering which is not a straightforward thing in
> PDF nor PostScript; the reason only JPEG image data is currently supported is that
> when the pass-through was implemented the library we use to do PDF printing - cairo -
> only supported it for JPEG, I *think* it does support certain PNG formats now though
> since we updated the library for other reasons a while back ].

If the required platforms are limited to Mac and Windows then you can use XPDF to generate the images ;-)

Cheers

Monte