You just like arguing ;). I don't think you are understanding the problem that the person is having. It's not about simply finding already rastered images and replacing them with alternate versions - that's pretty simple and there is an example of using iText for doing just that. The problem is a need to convert/rasterize all vector artwork on the page into one or more raster images WITHOUT impacting the text AND WITHOUT changing any visual appearance of the content of the page. In the process, you will probably want to optimize the output.
Actually, this problem is difficult with HTML too. Consider an HTML page that uses CSS for absolute or relative positioning of content, so that there is an opportunity for multiple objects to overlay & intersect with each other. Your task is to reduce that to the smallest number of objects that produce the same visual result with all text kept intact. Now, add to that all the complexities of the PDF rendering model - overlapping (Z-ordered) objects, color management, rich transparency model, etc. And these are all things that are being considered for HTML5 - so that the same problems would now manifest themselves in that environment as well. So again, this has nothing to do with structured/tagged PDF - it's a completely unrelated problem/issue. Leonard -----Original Message----- From: Mike Marchywka [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, March 26, 2009 8:03 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [iText-questions] How to duplicate PDF text but rasterize graphics > > The ONLY company that offers this technology is Apago (http://www.apago.com) > in their PDF Enhancer > product. The technology is called "Selective Rasterization" and works quite > nicely (of course, I designed/architected it and wrote the associate code - > so I > am kind of biased ;). > Why is this so difficult? What patents or publications came out of this effort? Can you outline the issues as I would think with html you could just swap out images. Is there a key objective this would not accomplish? I have to buy a product that took a heroic effort to produce just to let me integrate data from multiple sources and this is an "enhancement?" LOL http://www.apagoinc.com/documents/PR-PDF-Enhancer-30.pdf > > > It is NOT a trivial piece of work - which is one of the reason > why no one else offers it...it took me a sizable amount of time, and I've been > doing PDF for>10 years. > After reading more of the spec documents, I was hoping to find an opportunity to congratulate Adobe for distinguishing target content from "artifacts" and in fact labeling formatting "junk" with a well chosen term :) The comments in the spec about reflowing and the importance of logical structure make it sound like there is the potential here for a reasonably well authored document to appeal to both the automated data processor and the viewer-of-nice-pictures. However, in response to your above post, I how have to ask, "What other simple tasks related to compacting the pictures and highlighting the information require heroic efforts once customers commit to PDF formats?" LOL. With html you could just swap out the images. [ same rant I've posted 10 times, different words however ] It sounds like you consider this a design feature. That is great but then you end up with situations like the US IRS offering documents to people who are unable to extract their own tax numbers from the artwork because no one enabled "user rights" or found some other features for those with proprietary interests. This isn't just with high-volume public documents as apparently special-field authors interested in letting people cite their work accurately ( using computer tools to automate the process without retyping ) aren't always aware ( or at least were not aware in recent past ) of your security/encryption "features" either. I'm beginning at least to believe your comments that this is a problem with customers and not inherent entirely in the PDF as an information communication format but I don't get the idea you do a lot to educate them or make the features well known ( apparently Reader could just as easily offer a greyed-out option when viewing the US IRS 1040 forms so a user like myself could complain to the IRS to "enable user rights" instead of blaming adobe for creating an information black hole but either your or customers don't want to let users know it is even possible ). Again, this typifies a big concern selling public agencies on your picture format when many people outside of Adobe or MSFT tools/mindset try to use the information in new ways, especially when information from many sources needs to be extracted and analyzed together. I don't have an algebra for pictures but I've managed to get pretty good with integer math... I'll even concede that "along with freedom comes responsibility" and if you offer a versatile format it can be difficult to sell the right defaults to every customers but in this case it seems the format lacks some versatility ( versatility has to be realizable, not just hypothetical and it sounds like this comparatively simple task is not simple). > > > > > > > Leonard > > > > > > > > > > From: Doug Moreland > [mailto:[email protected]] > > Sent: Wednesday, March 25, 2009 6:16 PM > > To: [email protected] > > Subject: [iText-questions] How to duplicate PDF text but rasterize > graphics > > > > > > > > > > Looking > for advice on the best approach to do something others may have tried. I have > PDFs with text and graphics. They are very large, due to the graphics. I want > to read each PDF and produce a new PDF with the text just as it was in the > original, but rasterize the rest of the graphics into a fairly low res bitmap > to be added behind the text, reducing the overall filesize of the bitmap. I do > not need to manipulate the text, just replicate it. Everything else can be > bitmapped. > > > > > > Any starting places would be greatly > appreciated. thank you. > > > > > _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail(r) is up to 70% faster. 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