PDF files as graphic objects in Author-View of the Editor

[SSC]

Hello,

we have got customers, who use PDF as graphic objects in their XML content.
Could you somehow imagine to also view PDFs similar to the common graphic files in the Author-View of the Editor.

The Antenna House Formatter is also able to use PDF files as graphics in the PDF publish and therefore the customer would like to avoid having these "PDF graphics" also in a different graphic format just for showing the images correct in the editor.

I guess this won´t be possible, but there’s no harm in asking.

Best regards,

Simon

[Radu]

Hello Simon,

You are not the first ones to ask this. We already have an issue logged in to provide rendering capabilities in the Author mode for PDF images and I added your vote for it. So when we decide to implement this you will be notified.

Regards,
Radu

[PeeDeeEff]

Please add my vote to this.

I just registered to look for a solution to this very issue - we are looking to convert an existing documentation flow to Oxygen and need a vector format that can be reliably saved from drawing tools such as Visio and included directly in the XML, rather than jump through multiple processing hoops.

SVG has many problems with the authoring tools, and bitmaps don't render well.... surely PDF must be the vector graphic format of choice for wide support now and future?

Any idea when this might be supported? I want to avoid spending lots of time on workarounds if the solution is anywhere close!

regards, Dan

[Radu]

Hi Dan,

I added your vote for this but I am not convinced PDF images will help you with vector graphics.
You can embed images in PDF but they will be stored as binary as far as I know. Even to embed SVG in PDF, it is first converted to a binary format and then embedded in the PDF.
The only image vector representation formats I personally know are SVG, EPS and CGM (which is an older standard).

Again, from the XML content maybe you want at some point to obtain some kind of HTML content, you will need to convert the PDF back to some popular binary image format like PNG or to SVG.

But the way in which images are shown in the Author mode will not influence in any way publishing the XML documents to different formats, maybe at publish time you will convert the vectorial format to some binary image format dynamically.

Regards,
Radu

[PeeDeeEff]

I think you may be confusing "bitmapped" with "binary".

PDF is indeed a binary format (as opposed to text) but it does contain vector-based drawing instructions, just like SVG and AI do, as opposed to sampled bitmaps containing pixels. This is important, because only vector formats are inherently scalable. Bitmaps (like PNG, JPG, TIFF) have all been sampled and thus lost the original vector information.

Indeed, Adobe llustrator can use PDF as its native saved file format, instead of AI.

Of course, PDFs _can_ have bitmaps embedded in them, which is what happens when you use e.g. JPGs in Oxygen and then render a PDF. You can see an example here: http://oxygenxml.com/doc/brochures/Data ... Editor.pdf

There is a bitmapped window example on the left, and a drawn box with logos on the right. The one on the right is in vector format and scalable - you can zoom in on it without losing quality. The one on the left pixellates. Both are in a PDF.

So, for high quality diagrams, we need a vector format. PDF gets my vote as it is supported by absolutely every other tool.

[Radu]

Hi,

You are right, PDF also has a vectorial way to specify images drawn inside it. And I did not know this yesterday

One alternative for you to have PDF images drawn in the Author mode:

Oxygen uses the standard Java ImageIO mechanism to load images. And if you have an ImageIO plugin which can render PDF, you can drop that JAR library in the "OXYGEN_INSTALL_DIR\lib" folder and Oxygen will know how to render PDF images in the Author mode. The problem is that although I can find Java-based projects for rendering PDF I cannot find one which also bundles an ImageIO plugin for this. So you would need to create your own plugin for this.
Of course the publishing part will have to be handled separately, publishing to PDF should work out of the box, for publishing to HTML-type formats you will have to perform some conversions from PDF image to some binary format or to SVG.

Regards,
Radu

[Radu]

Hi,

For Oxygen 15.2 which should appear in January next year we experimented rendering PDF in the visual Author editing page using the open source PDF library Apache PDF Box library (I tested with pdfbox-app-1.8.2.jar).
Although we will not include this library in Oxygen by default because it is quite large, for the standalone version of Oxygen 15.2 users will be able to copy the library to the OXYGEN_INSTALL_DIR\lib folder and then start Oxygen.

For the Eclipse version of Oxygen the library will need to be added to the set of referenced libraries used by the Oxygen plugin.

If you want to test some beta kits, just contact us directly (support@oxygenxml.com) and we'll try to provide them.

Regards,
Radu