Hi, I recently tried to do something with the embedded pdfe library and noticed that accessing strings comes with certain problems. PDF strings are always returned in raw form without the surrounding <> or (), so any script using them will need to know if it is a hex string or a "normal" () delimited string in order to treat it correctly. So pdfe.getstring is a bit weird: It gives a Lua string but no indication which type of string is returned. So if pdfe.getstring e.g. returns "425", it can be either correspond to the actual text "425" or it can be the hexadecimal encoding of "BP". Given that PDF allows beoth upper and lowercase letters and even an odd number of digits in a hexadecimal string, even guessing the right format is hard and error-prone, making pdf.getstring not particularly useful. The same issue appears with the `__index` metafunctions of dictionaries and arrays. This is especially weird because it's inconsistent with PDF names which always get decoded before they are passed to the user.
Also even after the Lua script figures out if it is a hex string or a literal string, it has to decode it. (Of course this part only applies if the actual value is needed and not if it only should be passed into another PDF string) That's not complicated, but it feels weird: After all, the underlying pplib already decoded the string, so it seems like it would be easier to make this decoded version accessible to the user. So would it be possible to maybe either change the existing functions or add new ones to 1. return the already decoded value and/or 2. give an indication if a literal or a hex string is returned? Best regards, Marcel _______________________________________________ dev-luatex mailing list dev-luatex@ntg.nl https://mailman.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/dev-luatex
