[poppler] Annot Improving (III)

[Brad Hards]

On Thursday 06 December 2007 10:45:09 am Iñigo Martínez wrote:
> I have changed again the last patch with the required changes and synced
> it with the git head.
This is good stuff.

> I have tried it with some annot testing PDF documents I have around and
> everything looks like is working correctly, but I have some (more)
> things I have notes about thought.
>
> 1. When the dash numbers in the arrays are wrong, poppler old code does
> give them 1 value, but reading the pdf reference there is this:
>
> "Note that no dash phase is specified; the phase is assumed to be 0."
>
> So I have assumed that it should have 0, so I have changed it. There are
> some error handling I don't know have to handle too, so I have added a
> TODO comment to do it later.
I'm not sure I fully understand your concern, because I don't know what you 
mean by "the dash numbers in the arrays are wrong". However my reading of the 
PDF reference (1.7, Table 8.17) leads me to understand that the lack of a 
phase is just how PDF does it. Try looking at Table 4.6 in the PDF reference.
Another way to think about it: imagine you have a dash pattern (D array) of [3 
4]:
---    ---    ---    --- 
What the lack of a phase means is that there is no way to do express this:
  ---    ---    ---    ---
(note the "offset" at the start of the line)

I think if there is an error (e.g. D array contains something that isn't a 
dash pattern), you should assume the default of [3] (i.e. three units on, 
three units off, repeating).

> 2. When handling the colors, poppler old code does default red and green
> to 0 but blue to 1. There is nothing about that in the reference. My
> code does default all colors to 0, as it does support more color spaces,
> maybe I shoudl change it but, where are those 'magic' numbers come
> from ?
I'm not sure. I agree this is missing information in the PDF reference.

> I think I should do some testing with Acrobat Reader to test everything.
> How do you do those testings ? How do you know what values does use
> Acrobat once it detects a wrong object/value ?
You can't. You can only observe a reasonable selection, and wait for the bug 
reports :-( If you need particular test cases, you may have to hand-edit a 
PDF file to get the right setup. Also, 
http://acroeng.adobe.com/Test_Files/comments/ might be useful.

I thought there was a bug report about annotation colours, but it is only on 
link colours.

> As always any comment is welcome.
I have a couple of extra comments:

The change to Gfx looks good (much better style), but I'm a bit concerned that 
the improvements will complicate the next xpdf merge. Albert did the last 
round of merges - I'd like his feedback on this. Is there likely to be 
problems with restricting the changes to the Annotation classes (i.e. keep 
the AnnotBorder, AnnotBorderArray, AnnotBorderBS, AnnotColor classes, but 
only use them behind the current AnnotBorderStyle interface)?

I think we should extract the corners (irrespective of what acroread does, per 
Implementation Note 81). If we don't want to use them for rendering the image 
backends then we should omit using them there (rather than in the annotation 
parser).  This shouldn't be too hard - it looks like you have all the code 
already, just commented out.

Brad