[XeTeX] Σχετ: Plain XeTeX, pdftitle, pdfinfo

Mon Jul 11 11:37:16 CEST 2016

Hi Zdenek,

On Jul 11, 2016, at 7:03 PM, Zdenek Wagner <zdenek.wagner at gmail.com<mailto:zdenek.wagner at gmail.com>> wrote:

As I found, it is not necessary to be fully PDF/X compliant, in some cases even PDF 1.5 is acceptable. It is a matter of negotiation with the printer what they accept and what they do not. The good companies are able to visualize the output without actually printing it so it is possible to check. and they can make the proof available on their web and send the private link to the customer.

Exactly.
For Phil’s book it would be good to know precisely what the printers have requested.

But for general usage into the future, we want the most flexible package that
can be written, to cope with all the identifiable variables.

     even though the page stream is clearly not compressed:

5 0 obj
<</Length 117>>
stream
 q 1 0 0 1 72 769.89 cm BT /F1 9.9626 Tf 19.925 -9.963 Td[(Hello)-333(W)82(orld!)]TJ 211.584 -654.747 Td[(1)]TJ ET Q

endstream

Fonts in that PDF do use compression.
The only other thing compressed is the XRef table.
When Acrobat is asked to convert to PDF/X the  xref table is uncompressed;
so that figures to be the real issue here.
Interesting.  I get no such complaint for any of the 302 pages, but neither am I asking Acrobat to convert the PDF to PDF/X (I would not know how to) -- all I am asking Acrobat to do is (a) convert the colour space, and (b) reduce the file size while making the PDF Acrobat 4+ compatible.  At the end of these two processes, Acrobat 7.1 pre-flight tells me the result is fully PDF/X-1A:2003 compliant

OK. But this is after using Acrobat, yes?
Not before.

pdfx.sty can do it but it makes use of hyperref which I do not like because it is a big package. My document containing English + Hindi crashed with one version of hyperref but I was unable to prepare a minimal example in order to write a useful bug report. It would be nice to have an interface for preparation PDF/A and PDF/X without Acrobat.

Can you send me any file that shows this?
I’m not interested in just MWEs, but real-world examples.

So far I can generate Metadata in Cyrillics, Greek, Armenian, Hebrew as well as latin-based languages.
At some point I plan to tackle Indic scripts as well.
So English + Hindi is an attractive challenge.

Anyway, I never include an ICC profile. I just convert the colours to CMYK using the right profiles and the resulting colours are exactly as I wanted.

It’s not clear to me how important a CMYK profile really is for TeX-generated material.
Mostly the CMYK colors are given algorithmically from RGB coordinates,
so RGB would probably suffice anyway.

Of course it’s a completely different story for artistic works, photographic or otherwise.

4.  The  \special {pdf: docinfo << … }   while valid, is *not* the recommended way to
     provide Metadata.
     The modern way is via  XMP which is an XML stream using uncompressed UTF-8 encoding.
     Some  docinfo  fields can be included also, provided they agree *exactly* with what
     is in the XMP packet.  For things like multiple authors, and more than one Keyword entry,
     it is best to put them into the XMP *only*.

     Again, with PDF/X-4 and higher, this is flagged as an issue.
Again, this is Hyperref's default behaviour; Acrobat itself then adds the XMP stuff when it saves the file.

pdfx.sty can do it

What I dislike is that pdfx has A4 size hard-wired, zwpagelayout.sty calculates the boxes based upon \paperheight and \paperwidth (without using eTeX and lua, just the old dimen registers arithmetic).

Not in v.1.5.8 — at least not for PDF/X.
That was a specific request which I responded to.

 pdfx.sty  has no coding about this for  PDF/A, so far as I can see.
Maybe it’s another of the things that hyperref does, which needs
to be over-ridden.  I’ll look again more closely tomorrow.

All of these issues are addressed, also for XeLaTeX, in the latest version (1.5.8)
of the  pdfx  LaTeX package.

         https://www.ctan.org/pkg/pdfx?lang=en

The package itself implements everything, (including ensuring that the correct color spaces are used)
and the documentation explains how to specify the (external) Metadata that you may wish to provide.
It has a sub-section discussing the limitations when using XeTeX as engine.
Hmmm.  Past experience suggests that LaTeX packages are no easy to get to work in a Plain context, but if I look at the \specials emitted that may well provide key information.  I know that this particular stable door was closed over 20 years ago, but I still wish that LaTeX were far far more modular than it actually is.  If only one could have a trivial wrapper such as Miniltx and then /any/ package could be used from within a Plain framerwork, how wonderful life would be.

Especially this one, it depends on a lot of files. I wanted to extract ideas how to build the XMP, how to include the ICC but I gave up.

XMP is done via a template file; e.g.  pdfx.xmp  or  pdfa.xmp .
There are many places where information can be supplied, via macros
such as  \xmp at Subject  and  \xmp at Author .
Much of the  pdfx  package is about supplying values for these, in UTF8 encoding.

Zdeněk Wagner
http://ttsm.icpf.cas.cz/team/wagner.shtml
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz<http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz/>

Cheers

Ross

Dr Ross Moore

Mathematics Dept | Level 2, S2.638 AHH
Macquarie University, NSW 2109, Australia

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