Reading PDF - a cry for help

[stephen barncard]

Not sure about your needs but...

You can save a lot of time between MacDraft and PDFs  by using Blue Mango's
wonderful and fully supported "Clairfy".  Select, copy to PDF in one step
with annotations available and online distribution if you want.

 It's FREE and highly recommended.

Get Clarify HERE <http://www.bluemangolearning.com/clarify/>

If your work includes MacDraft, you should know about the (Autocad standard)
DWG/DXF import and export feature. It is all plain text and human readable,
with point, line and position data that some of which could be turned into
corresponding LC commands. But it might be easier to just use Clarify. It's
really good.

On 29 September 2011 10:02, Joe Lewis Wilkins <pepetoo at cox.net> wrote:

> I find all of this somewhat tantalizing, but the only way I've found to
> make a PDF document useful in what I'm doing is to take a screen shot of it
> and then paste or import it as an image into the other application. Though I
> do this mostly in MacDraft, I should imagine that the same technique can be
> used in LC, since I often use MD as a method of transitioning different
> kinds of images into LC. Of course I'm interested in what you "see" in a
> PDF; not what else there might be there, of which I know nothing. I don't
> understand all of this "parsing" of data from or in a PDF.
>
> Joe Wilkins
>
>
> On Sep 29, 2011, at 9:50 AM, Dar Scott wrote:
>
> >
> > On Sep 29, 2011, at 9:24 AM, Ken Ray wrote:
> >> Are you looking at just extracting the images? Or other relevant parts
> of the PDF? The reason I ask is that it looks like binary data is always
> contained between two lines: "stream" and "endstream", so extracting just
> the streaming data should be pretty quick to do; although the next step
> would be going to read the bytes of what was extracted and then determine if
> it's an image or some other thing that had to be represented with a "stream"
> in the PDF...
> >
> >
> > There are a couple issues that complicate this in general.
> >
> > The parameters needed to process the stream need to be parsed and they
> can be far away.
> >
> > There are many stream filters (some complicated compression) and they can
> be nested.  I looked at a corpus of PDF files and, yeah, a several are used
> in practice.
> >
> > However, if one needs to parse the output of a specific program or a
> specific model of a scanner, then the work to do parsing in LiveCode is a
> lot less.
> >
> > I hope that makes sense; I'm a little under the weather today.
> >
> > Dar
>
>
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-- 



Stephen Barncard
San Francisco Ca. USA

more about sqb  <http://www.google.com/profiles/sbarncar>