[scribus-dev] Fwd: Great meeting you in Saarbrücken

[Leonard Rosenthol]

> A first step would be to preserve style information for stories. Using marked content to preserve an XML-like structure
>
That’s called Tagged PDF and been part of PDF since v1.4


>and storing CSS styles as page piece dictionaries should achieve similar results as interoperability between word processors.
>
Actually, the right way to do this is using attributes on the tags and the ClassMap in the tag tree.  CSS is an official type of attribute in PDF 2.0.

You do have to be careful about arbitrary CSS, since you can have scripts inside of CSS…and that impacts security.

Leonard


From: Andreas Vox <andreas.vox at gmail.com>
Reply-To: Scribus List <scribus-dev at lists.scribus.net>
Date: Monday, June 10, 2019 at 11:21 PM
To: Scribus List <scribus-dev at lists.scribus.net>
Subject: Re: [scribus-dev] Fwd: Great meeting you in Saarbrücken

Hi Tamir
...

For the benefit of everyone else on this list, when Leonard and I spoke
at PDF Days 2018 in Berlin, I proposed the idea of extending the PDF
spec to support the embedding of sufficient metadata that would make it
possible to edit the document in some sort of "standardized" way. We
would then finally have a way to exchange editable documents with others
with robust layout and the other features of PDF - no other format
offers this.

Obviously, most applications have their own proprietary format and their
own internal models of the document structure. But there are very many
similarities among the various canvas-based document formats and, just
like PDF is a common standard for final form documents now, wouldn't it
be great if there were a common standard for editable documents too?
...

I think it's only possible to achieve two of the following: editable, stable layout and optimal layout. If you modify a document in another application than the one which produced it, there will always be difference in appearance, functionality or both.

But there's definitely a lot of opportunity to improve editing PDF if you accept adequate layout changes. IMHO, reflow, font substitution, change of color model, change of resolution and scaling are acceptable layout changes. Missing content, inconsistent line breaking or distortion are obviously not acceptable.

A first step would be to preserve style information for stories. Using marked content to preserve an XML-like structure and storing CSS styles as page piece dictionaries should achieve similar results as interoperability between word processors.
Layout programs like Scribus do not only use margins and columns, but also have master/template pages, layers and text flowing around images. Providing a standard for that will be much more challenging.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.scribus.net/pipermail/scribus-dev/attachments/20190613/c68bc12a/attachment-0001.html>