[scribus-dev] PDF output

[Elvis Stansvik]

2011/8/22 Elvis Stansvik <elvstone at gmail.com>:
> Hey folks,
>
> So, for the first time I took a closer look at what's involved in
> getting PDF output of an item.
>
> Somehow I had imagined that there would actually be some form of
> painter API available for it. But it seems that you actually have to
> manually append PS/PDF commands to a string in
> PDFLibCore::PDF_ProcessItem(...) :(
>
> Is this correct?
>
> This seems extremely fragile to me, and I've never worked with the PS
> language directly before. I see that the PDFLibCore has at least some
> convenience functions that might help me with the generation.
>
> If I haven't missed anything and this really is the way to do it, then
> I guess the best/easiest way forward is to:
>
> 1) Make the existing CollapsedTablePainter (which handles painting of
> a table to canvas, e.g. painting to an ScPainter) a friend of
> PDFLibCore, to be able to access its convenience functions.
>
> 2) Add something like a
>
> CollapsedTablePainter::paintTablePDF(PageItem_Table* table, PDFLibCore
> *pdf, QString& output)
>
> function that will append the PDF commands to the output parameter,
> and which will use convenience functions of PDFLibCore where
> appropriate.
>
> 3) Have PDFLibCore keep an instance of CollapsedTablePainter and have
> it call paintTablePDF(...) in PDF_ProcessItem(...) when encountering a
> table item. This is analog to how the PageItem_Table itself currently
> has an instance of CollapsedTablePainter and calls the paintTable(...)
> function in DrawObj_Item(...) to paint the table on canvas. A lot of
> code in CollapsedTablePainter can then hopefully be reused.

The paintTablePDF(...) would of course also call the
PDFLibCore::PDF_ProcessItem(...) for processing the text frames of its
cells.

Elvis