[poppler] Direct Poppler access without frontend allowed?

[Andreas Butti]

Ok, I can provide my code, but I need some help to complete integrate 
with Poppler.

What I did now:
I have two PDFs, one for background and one for the foreground, like two 
slides on a overhead projector, the second slide is on top of the first 
slide. Sometimes there are two pages, 1 foreground and one background, 
sometimes there is only one PDF.
Not all source PDFs are used always, and sometimes PDF Pages are used twice.


My code does the following:

    * Extract the contents stream of the pages
    * Append the stream from one page to the other page
          o update all references, e.g. images and fonts, because /F1 in
            one document is may not the same font than /F1 in the other
            document
    * Write outlines to the document (they have to be created by the
      application, because if there are pages inserted / deleted, I
      cannot use the original outlines)
    * Write metadata (Creator, Autor, Creationdate etc.)
    * Writeout the document to a file
          o Create new XREF table
          o compress the contents of the pages with GZ



My application is mostly written in C++, but I use GTK (no discussion 
about this combination;-)).

So I first used the GLib frontend, but there I had problems with 
searching, and I cannot access the underlying poppler objects.


The Question is now which frontend I should use.


In my opinion, the best solution is may to create a new frontend, e.g. a 
PDF-editing frontend?

Because then it's possible to change some behaviour, and add other 
things, like:

    * Edit text within PDF documents (not add, add is no problem with
      merging)
    * Delete objects from a PDF (e.g. select a rectangle and delete all
      objects within this rectangle)
    * Copy objects

Currently there is no easy to use application which support these 3 
operations for Linux.

If poppler would have such a frontend I'll may append this functionality 
to Xournal++ (in the future, not now).


What do you think about this?




Andreas

Am 11.05.2011 21:43, schrieb Albert Astals Cid:
> A Wednesday, May 11, 2011, Andreas Butti va escriure:
>> Hello everybody
> Hi
>
>> I'm working on a new Xournal version (Xournal++, not yet present on a
>> webpage, only in the SVN).
>>
>> I used Poppler to display PDF and also for PDF export, to implement the
>> PDF export (merging two PDFs together) I access Poppler without any
>> frontend.
>>
>> I'm working on Ubuntu, which contain all necessary headers, but other
>> distributions don't.
>>
>> Now there is a discussion if it's allowed to access Poppler without
>> frontend, or not.
>>
>> I thought it should be allowed, because on the poppler Wiki are also two
>> projects listed which access poppler without frontent,
>>
>> But now I need a clear answer if it's allowed or not, and if not if
>> there is another way for me to implement this without breaking any rules.
> It is not encouraged since we reserve the right to change the API (and do so)
> at any release (minor versions included) while our API in the frontends is
> much more stable.
>
> If you tell us what you are missing from the public frontend API we might add
> it, or you might even contribute the code you have that uses the internal API
> so we add it to our frontend ;-)
>
> Albert
>
>> Thank you for the answer.
>>
>>
>> Andreas
>>
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