Bruno The problem with StackOverflow can be summed up by a friend of mine from years ago
"The pooling of ignorance is not knowledge" Maybe what is needed is a highly graphical Dummies guide to iText, which starts with 'This is what iText can NOT do', then moves to 'this is what it CAN do'. Not how to do those things, but taken from a survey of the most regular questions asked where people get things wrong. Surely the problem is that doing a G search on things will bring up answers like 'cant be done' written (unhelpfully) by someone who can at best be described as the blind leading the blind. One wrong answer that gets into the wild can cause even more damage, as you are then always in defensive mode. john renfrew Right Way Up -----Original Message----- From: 1T3XT BVBA [mailto:i...@1t3xt.info] Sent: 17 February 2013 21:21 To: Post all your questions about iText here Subject: Re: [iText-questions] Creating Accessible Tables in 5.3.5 (Tagged, Marked Content) On 17/02/2013 0:29, Leonard Rosenthol wrote: > On 2/16/13 3:51 AM, "1T3XT BVBA"<i...@1t3xt.info> wrote: >> >This includes R&D regarding the Matterhorn Protocol. > Why do you believe this is an important thing to invest in? Do you have > any customers asking for it? Have you talked to other vendors (of note) > who plan to introduce this into their products? Do you believe that > supporting it will have a benefit to users? Let's start with something completely different: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14830097/convert-a-pdfreader-to-a-pdfdocu ment/14832487#comment20918464_14832487 I downvoted an answer on StackOverflow (costing my 1 reputation point) because I'm really tired of people saying "there's a bug in iText" while in reality they are using the wrong class for what they are trying to achieve: Downvoted because examples like this cause an enormous amount of support questions such as: "the page size of copied content is different from the original document", "all the annotations are gone after copying", etc... People should read the documentation! See also http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14770942/itext-pdf-merge-document-overflo w-outside-pdf-text-truncated-page-and-not-di/14771651#comment20678609_147716 51 Here mkl (also very active on this mailing-list) says: "I wonder why so many people find the wrong examples first..." I really get frustrated when people use iText the wrong way. I know I shouldn't, but I can't help it. With this in mind: Once we start saying that iText supports PDF/UA creation, we'll need to make sure people don't have the wrong expectations. Sure, you'll be able to create correct PDF/UA documents using iText, but iText is a library that allows you to do many things. That is: it also allows you to pretend creating a PDF/UA document that isn't conforming with the PDF/UA standard. Although right use of iText will create correct PDFs, we all know that you can seriously screw up a PDF because iText is so versatile. Remember the "with great power comes great responsibility" quote (taken from Spider-Man) mentioned in the "iText in Action" books. We need good documentation and a good set of rules to make sure developers using iText create PDF/UA documents correctly. Having a clear checklist based on the PDF/UA standard as well as the Matterhorn protocol should help. I have to admit that I haven't started working on that documentation yet. I've assigned the PDF/UA-related development to a team within iText Software, and they're developing the functionality. Once they consider the functionality to be stable, I'll start reading all the related documentation, compare it with the implementation, document it, and whilst writing the documentation improve the code where necessary. Is there a market for it? There's certainly a market for PDF/UA if I look at the inquiries we receive through http://itextpdf.com/sales/ Is there a market for related UA protocols? I don't know. I always start with the academic approach; then afterwards I switch my point of view and I look at use cases: is there a business for it? If there is, let's promote it; if there isn't, it was a good learning experience. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- The Go Parallel Website, sponsored by Intel - in partnership with Geeknet, is your hub for all things parallel software development, from weekly thought leadership blogs to news, videos, case studies, tutorials, tech docs, whitepapers, evaluation guides, and opinion stories. Check out the most recent posts - join the conversation now. http://goparallel.sourceforge.net/ _______________________________________________ iText-questions mailing list iText-questions@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/itext-questions iText(R) is a registered trademark of 1T3XT BVBA. Many questions posted to this list can (and will) be answered with a reference to the iText book: http://www.itextpdf.com/book/ Please check the keywords list before you ask for examples: http://itextpdf.com/themes/keywords.php ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Go Parallel Website, sponsored by Intel - in partnership with Geeknet, is your hub for all things parallel software development, from weekly thought leadership blogs to news, videos, case studies, tutorials, tech docs, whitepapers, evaluation guides, and opinion stories. Check out the most recent posts - join the conversation now. http://goparallel.sourceforge.net/ _______________________________________________ iText-questions mailing list iText-questions@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/itext-questions iText(R) is a registered trademark of 1T3XT BVBA. Many questions posted to this list can (and will) be answered with a reference to the iText book: http://www.itextpdf.com/book/ Please check the keywords list before you ask for examples: http://itextpdf.com/themes/keywords.php
