From read at robertlread.net  Sun Jan 20 21:32:18 2008
From: read at robertlread.net (Robert L. Read)
Date: Sun, 20 Jan 2008 15:32:18 -0600
Subject: [cl-typesetting-devel] An interesting problem from a neophyte...
Message-ID: <1200864738.7638.197.camel@penguin.yourdomain.com>

Thanks for making cl-pdf and cl-typesetting; they are a great idea.

I'm attempting to use them now.  However, I am implementing a website,
and I want to render the PDFs on demand, not store them in files.  The
API to cl-pdf is stream-based, which in theory should allow me to send
in an "in-memory" stream, rather than a "file-based-stream".  For
example, I can almost get it to work by using the
"IN-MEMORY-OUTPUT-STREAM" of the "flexi-streams" package.

However, flexi-streams does not support file-position, which is used by
cl-pdf to write the "xrefs" section of the PDF.

I thought about attempting to extend a flexi-stream class to support
file-position, but that is little more than I want to take on right now.

So my questions are:

1)  Am I crazy to want to do this in-memory?
2)  What are the xrefs, and do I need them?
3)  Is it necessary to use "file-position" to compute this? (perhaps the
PDF spec and character encoding issues basically for the answer to be
"yes")
4)  Is there some package that supports "in-memory" files that corectly
computes file-position that I may not know about?


-- 
Robert L. Read <read at robertlread.net>
Konsenti.com



From marc.battyani at fractalconcept.com  Sun Jan 20 21:55:08 2008
From: marc.battyani at fractalconcept.com (Marc Battyani)
Date: Sun, 20 Jan 2008 22:55:08 +0100
Subject: [cl-typesetting-devel] Acrobat 5.1: Broken space strings (PDF
	operator TJ)
In-Reply-To: <001201c847af$3121d990$8100a8c0@digo>
References: <001201c847af$3121d990$8100a8c0@digo>
Message-ID: <4793C33C.1070300@fractalconcept.com>

Dmitriy Ivanov wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Please take a look at the attached pdf-file in various viewers. It was
> generated by paragraphs with :h-align :fill and explicit :hfill, i.e.
>
>    (tt:paragraph (:h-align :fill)
>      (tt:format-string "Nr of words ~d - ~a" count comment)
>      :hfill
>      "Words:"  (dotimes (i count) (tt:format-string " wrd:~d" (1+ i)))
>
> To me, the file looks fine in GSview 4.3. But Acrobat Reader 5.1 renders
> three lines as follows.
>
> (line 1) The right words are shown not at the right margin.
>
> (line 2) There is a spurious space between wrd:1 and wrd:2.
> Such a break can potentially emerge at an arbitrary place in the text line,
> even within a word.
>
> (line 3) Look fine.
>
> Actually, the mentioned Acrobat version seems to wrongly compute size back
> from the negative unit of space amount. The space is computed in
>      #<method stroke (text-line t t)>.
> I have got a new version of stroke.lisp with a workaround but not committed
> it yet.
>   
Looks fine for me in Acrobat 8.1.
If only the old versions of Acrobat have this problem, then let's keep
it that way. Anyway, people should download a more recent version of
acrobat as it's free.

> BTW, why is maximum of nb-spaces, the number of spaces within one
> text-chunk, limited to 10? Is this an experimental value or due to the TJ
> operator limitation?
>   
I don't remember if there was a reason for this but it's probably not a
good thing anyway.

Marc




From marc.battyani at fractalconcept.com  Sun Jan 20 22:01:12 2008
From: marc.battyani at fractalconcept.com (Marc Battyani)
Date: Sun, 20 Jan 2008 23:01:12 +0100
Subject: [cl-typesetting-devel] An interesting problem from a neophyte...
In-Reply-To: <1200864738.7638.197.camel@penguin.yourdomain.com>
References: <1200864738.7638.197.camel@penguin.yourdomain.com>
Message-ID: <4793C4A8.50102@fractalconcept.com>

Robert L. Read wrote:
> Thanks for making cl-pdf and cl-typesetting; they are a great idea.
>
> I'm attempting to use them now.  However, I am implementing a website,
> and I want to render the PDFs on demand, not store them in files.  The
> API to cl-pdf is stream-based, which in theory should allow me to send
> in an "in-memory" stream, rather than a "file-based-stream".  For
> example, I can almost get it to work by using the
> "IN-MEMORY-OUTPUT-STREAM" of the "flexi-streams" package.
>
> However, flexi-streams does not support file-position, which is used by
> cl-pdf to write the "xrefs" section of the PDF.
>
> I thought about attempting to extend a flexi-stream class to support
> file-position, but that is little more than I want to take on right now.
>
> So my questions are:
>
> 1)  Am I crazy to want to do this in-memory?
>   
No, I do this all the time. ;-)
> 2)  What are the xrefs, and do I need them?
>   
It's the positions of the objects in the file. I'm sure you need them. :)
> 3)  Is it necessary to use "file-position" to compute this? (perhaps the
> PDF spec and character encoding issues basically for the answer to be
> "yes")
>   
It's mush easier to implement file-position in flexi-streams than trying
to try to compute it at the cl-pdf level.
> 4)  Is there some package that supports "in-memory" files that corectly
> computes file-position that I may not know about?
>   
Sure, just write the pdf to a string. It's what I do in my web applications.

Marc



From read at robertlread.net  Sun Jan 20 22:06:29 2008
From: read at robertlread.net (Robert L. Read)
Date: Sun, 20 Jan 2008 16:06:29 -0600
Subject: [cl-typesetting-devel] An interesting problem from a neophyte...
In-Reply-To: <4793C4A8.50102@fractalconcept.com>
References: <1200864738.7638.197.camel@penguin.yourdomain.com>
	<4793C4A8.50102@fractalconcept.com>
Message-ID: <1200866789.7638.202.camel@penguin.yourdomain.com>

On Sun, 2008-01-20 at 23:01 +0100, Marc Battyani wrote:
> > 4)  Is there some package that supports "in-memory" files that
> corectly
> > computes file-position that I may not know about?
> >   
> Sure, just write the pdf to a string. It's what I do in my web
> applications.
> 
> Marc
> 

Do you mean generate the file, and then read it into a string?  I
understand that will work --- my goal is to avoid writing a file at all.

Does the API allow you to write directly to a string?  I don't see that
it does.



From marc.battyani at fractalconcept.com  Mon Jan 21 08:04:19 2008
From: marc.battyani at fractalconcept.com (Marc Battyani)
Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2008 09:04:19 +0100
Subject: [cl-typesetting-devel] An interesting problem from a	neophyte...
In-Reply-To: <1200866789.7638.202.camel@penguin.yourdomain.com>
References: <1200864738.7638.197.camel@penguin.yourdomain.com>	
	<4793C4A8.50102@fractalconcept.com>
	<1200866789.7638.202.camel@penguin.yourdomain.com>
Message-ID: <47945203.2050706@fractalconcept.com>

Robert L. Read wrote:
> On Sun, 2008-01-20 at 23:01 +0100, Marc Battyani wrote:
>   
>>> 4)  Is there some package that supports "in-memory" files that
>>>       
>> corectly
>>     
>>> computes file-position that I may not know about?
>>>   
>>>       
>> Sure, just write the pdf to a string. It's what I do in my web
>> applications.
>>
>> Marc
>>     
> Do you mean generate the file, and then read it into a string?  I
> understand that will work --- my goal is to avoid writing a file at all.
>
> Does the API allow you to write directly to a string?  I don't see that
> it does.
>   
Sure, you can use (defmethod write-document ((s stream) &optional
(document *document*)) to write to a string:

  (with-output-to-string (s)
    (pdf:with-document ()
      ...
       (pdf:write-document s)))

Marc



From read at robertlread.net  Mon Jan 21 17:51:24 2008
From: read at robertlread.net (Robert L. Read)
Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2008 11:51:24 -0600
Subject: [cl-typesetting-devel] An interesting problem from a	neophyte...
In-Reply-To: <47945203.2050706@fractalconcept.com>
References: <1200864738.7638.197.camel@penguin.yourdomain.com>
	<4793C4A8.50102@fractalconcept.com>
	<1200866789.7638.202.camel@penguin.yourdomain.com>
	<47945203.2050706@fractalconcept.com>
Message-ID: <1200937884.4276.16.camel@penguin.yourdomain.com>

Sure, you can use (defmethod write-document ((s stream) &optional
> (document *document*)) to write to a string:
> 
>   (with-output-to-string (s)
>     (pdf:with-document ()
>       ...
>        (pdf:write-document s)))
> 
> Marc


Unfortunately, this fails for me on SBCL 1.0.13, with the following
error.  Below this trace is an example of what I am doing with
flexi-streams, which seems to work, but is hideous (function
"third-doc").

It seems likely that some change in SBCL's stream typing has lead to
this error.  I have also tried removing :pdf-binary from *features*.  I
notice in config.lisp that for sbcl the +external-format+ is set
to :latin-1, which seems a bit antiquated, in that SBCL is now fully
unicode-compatible.


#<SB-IMPL::STRING-OUTPUT-STREAM {100475E241}> is not a binary output
stream.
   [Condition of type SIMPLE-TYPE-ERROR]

Restarts:
 0: [ABORT] Return to SLIME's top level.
 1: [TERMINATE-THREAD] Terminate this thread (#<THREAD
"repl-thread" {10031A8D31}>)

Backtrace:
  0: (SB-KERNEL:ILL-BOUT #<SB-IMPL::STRING-OUTPUT-STREAM {100475E241}>)
  1: (WRITE-BYTE 66 #<SB-IMPL::STRING-OUTPUT-STREAM {100475E241}>)
  2: ((SB-PCL::FAST-METHOD PDF::WRITE-STREAM-CONTENT (STRING))
      #<unavailable argument>
      #<unavailable argument>
      "BT
          0.0    829.0 Td
     /CLF101 12.00 Tf
        100.0 Tz
     [ (Gener) 10 (ated) -278 (with) -278 (Cl-Pdf) -278 (and) -278
(Cl-typesetting) -31419 ] TJ
     ET
     BT ..)
  3: ((SB-PCL::FAST-METHOD PDF::WRITE-OBJECT (PDF::PDF-STREAM))
      #<unavailable argument>
      #S(SB-PCL::FAST-METHOD-CALL
         :FUNCTION #<FUNCTION #>
         :PV NIL
         :NEXT-METHOD-CALL #S(SB-PCL::FAST-METHOD-CALL
                              :FUNCTION #
                              :PV NIL
                              :NEXT-METHOD-CALL NIL
                              :ARG-INFO (1 . T)) ..))
  4: ((SB-PCL::FAST-METHOD PDF::WRITE-OBJECT (PDF::INDIRECT-OBJECT))
      #<unused argument>
      #<unused argument>
      #<PDF::INDIRECT-OBJECT {1003853061}>
      T)
  5: ((LAMBDA ()))
  6: (SB-IMPL::%WITH-STANDARD-IO-SYNTAX #<CLOSURE (LAMBDA #)
{10029FEF79}>)
  7: ((SB-PCL::FAST-METHOD PDF:WRITE-DOCUMENT (STREAM))
      #<unused argument>
      #<unused argument>
      #<SB-IMPL::STRING-OUTPUT-STREAM {100475E241}>
      #<PDF::DOCUMENT {100245C801}>)
  8: (FOURTH-DOC)


(defmethod flexi-streams::stream-write-char ((imo
flexi-streams::in-memory-output-stream) c)
  (format t "trying to write: ~A~%" c)
  (format t "trying to type: ~A~%" (type-of c))
  (flexi-streams::stream-write-byte imo (char-code c))
)
(defun third-doc ()
  (let ((str

(flexi-streams::make-in-memory-output-stream :element-type :character)))
   (tt:with-document
      ()
    (let ((content (tt:compile-text
		    ()
		    (tt:paragraph () "Generated with Cl-Pdf and Cl-typesetting")
		    (tt::with-style (:font "Helvetica" :font-size 8)
		      (tt:paragraph () "Spudalicious")
		      )
		    )))
      (tt:draw-pages content)
      (when pdf:*page* (typeset:finalize-page pdf:*page*))
      (tt:write-document str))
    )
   (let ((output (make-string-output-stream)))
     (loop for obj  across (flexi-streams::get-output-stream-sequence
str) do
	   (if (typep obj 'character) (write-char obj output) (write-char
(code-char obj) output)))
     (get-output-stream-string output)
     )
))

(defun fourth-doc ()
  (with-output-to-string (str)
   (tt:with-document
      ()
    (let ((content (tt:compile-text
		    ()
		    (tt:paragraph () "Generated with Cl-Pdf and Cl-typesetting")
		    (tt::with-style (:font "Helvetica" :font-size 8)
		      (tt:paragraph () "Spudalicious")
		      )
		    )))
      (tt:draw-pages content)
      (when pdf:*page* (typeset:finalize-page pdf:*page*))
      (tt:write-document str))
    )
   str)
)



From jan.marecek at gmail.com  Mon Jan 28 06:12:09 2008
From: jan.marecek at gmail.com (jan)
Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2008 17:12:09 +1100
Subject: [cl-typesetting-devel] bullet character
Message-ID: <200801281712.10560.jan.marecek@gmail.com>


How do I add a bullet character to a document?

-- 
jan


From philpot at ISI.EDU  Mon Jan 28 17:44:49 2008
From: philpot at ISI.EDU (Andrew Philpot)
Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2008 09:44:49 -0800
Subject: [cl-typesetting-devel] bullet character
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 28 Jan 2008 17:12:09 +1100."
	<200801281712.10560.jan.marecek@gmail.com> 
Message-ID: <200801281744.m0SHinFv001770@blombos.isi.edu>



  How do I add a bullet character to a document?

  -- 
  jan

I use (code-char #XB7), aka #\middle_dot (at least in ACL).

Andrew




From jan.marecek at gmail.com  Mon Jan 28 23:10:02 2008
From: jan.marecek at gmail.com (jan)
Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 10:10:02 +1100
Subject: [cl-typesetting-devel] bullet character
In-Reply-To: <200801281744.m0SHinFv001770@blombos.isi.edu>
References: <200801281744.m0SHinFv001770@blombos.isi.edu>
Message-ID: <200801291010.03158.jan.marecek@gmail.com>

>>   How do I add a bullet character to a document?

> I use (code-char #XB7), aka #\middle_dot (at least in ACL).

That doesn't work for me, I'm using unicode enabled sbcl such that
(format nil "~c" #\middle_dot) => "?"
however 
(tt:format-string "~c" #\middle_dot) outputs ??
I also tried using symbol font but that produced no output at all.

I've decided to render circles instead, it just works and gives better control 
over size as well.

-- 
jan


From divanov at aha.ru  Tue Jan 29 07:51:38 2008
From: divanov at aha.ru (Dmitriy Ivanov)
Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 10:51:38 +0300
Subject: [cl-typesetting-devel] bullet character
References: <200801281744.m0SHinFv001770@blombos.isi.edu>
	<200801291010.03158.jan.marecek@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <000001c8624b$ca6ab840$8100a8c0@digo>

Hello jan,

| >>   How do I add a bullet character to a document?
|
|> I use (code-char #XB7), aka #\middle_dot (at least in ACL).
|
| That doesn't work for me, I'm using unicode enabled sbcl such that
| (format nil "~c" #\middle_dot) => "?"
| however
| (tt:format-string "~c" #\middle_dot) outputs ??

I would recommend using Bullet character #\U+2022 in LispWorks ((code-char
#x2022) should wokr in other implementations). In latin-1 and some Windows
code pages, it corresponds to #x95 = 149. But in Type1 fonts like Helvetica
or Symbols the corresponding code is #xB7=183.

The expanded mapping of useful characters seems like this:

(defparameter *char-single-byte-codes*
 '((#.(code-char #x2013) . #x96) ; En dash: 8211 -> 150
   (#.(code-char #x2014) . #x97) ; Em dash: 8212 -> 151
   (#.(code-char #x2022) . #xB7) ; Bullet: 8226 -> 183
   (#.(code-char #x2026) . #x85) ; Ellipsis: 8230 -> 133
   (#.(code-char #x2039) . #x8B) ; Single left angle quotation mark: 8249 ->
139
   (#.(code-char #x203A) . #x9B) ; Single right angle quotation mark:
8250 -> 155
   (#.(code-char #x2122) . #x99) ; Trademark: 8482 -> 153
) )

I have just committed the addition.
--
Sincerely,
Dmitriy Ivanov
lisp.ystok.ru