[poppler] Annoying question: SVG output from Poppler?

[Marcus Silva]

On 6/5/05, Leonard Rosenthol <leonardr at pdfsages.com> wrote:
>          What sort of editing are you trying to do with PDF/PS?   Simple
> text touchup?  Color management?  Other?

Nothing too complex. I am used to dropping LaTeX equation from
EquationEditor into Keynote or Photoshop in my Mac, and I have to go
through round about ways to do similar things in Inkscape in GNOME,
and like I said what was text is not treated as text anymore, and even
then there are bugs. Sometimes I wonder if the idea of using SVG as
the content model for images in Inkscape was a good idea, but that is
a discussion for another mailing list ...

It is mostly a question of interopterability: when I want to reuse
diagrams I extract from PDFs into images I can edit in Inkscape, and
perhaps export into the web. Nothing too sophisticated, so I would not
mind the lossy aspect of the conversion.

>          The biggest problem here is that both PS and PDF are MUCH richer
> in terms of renderable content than SVG (and that doesn't include all the
> non-content features available in PDF).  PDF supports 11 different
> colorspaces, while SVG supports only 1 (1.1/1.2 supports a second).  PDF's
> can handle fonts in 7 different formats, while SVG only supports 4 of
> them.  (etc.)

  I did not realize there was such a large gap between the two
formats.  That is probably bad news for Inkscape in the long run ...
maybe not such a great alternative to Illustrator ...
 
>          So any conversion between the two is quite lossy.
> 
>          If that's OK for you, then there are solutions out there - you've
> noted two, for example.  I written an SVGOutputDev for Xpdf - it's not that
> complex an operation DEPENDING on where you put your functional limitations
> (eg. what you are willing to give up in the conversion process).

  That sounds very promissing ... Does it convert PDF text to SVG
text? What are the general functional limitations beyond color space
issues?

Marcus