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qpdf/TODO

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2018-12-23 16:44:43 +00:00
Current
=======
* open bugs
* form features
* flatten
* include in json at document and page level
* values
* names
* other stuff?
* preserve when merging and splitting; functionality should be
similar to outlines.
* set value?
* maybe basic appearance generation for values within pdf doc
encoding that don't use subsetted fonts
* replace mode: --replace-object, --replace-stream-raw,
--replace-stream-filtered
* update first paragraph of QPDF JSON in the manual to mention this
* object numbers are not stable
* you don't have to specify length for streams
* you only have to specify filtering for streams if providing raw data
* special mode for compressing images with DCT
* allow specifying a single image, all images, images based on
size, specific images
* never replace an image if the replacement is not smaller than the
original
* bookmarks (outlines) 12.3.3
* support bookmarks when merging
* prune bookmarks that don't point to a surviving page when merging
or splitting
* make sure conflicting named destinations work possibly test by
including the same file by two paths in a merge
When pruning outlines, keep all outlines in the hierarchy that are
above an outline for a page we care about. If one of the ancestor
outlines points to a non-existent page, clear its dest. If an
outline does not have any children that point to pages in the
document, just omit it.
Possible strategy:
* resolve all named destinations to explicit destinations
* concatenate top-level outlines
* prune outlines whose dests don't point to a valid page
* recompute all /Count fields
Test files
* page-labels-and-outlines.pdf: old file with both page labels and
outlines. All destinations are explicit destinations. Each page
has Potato and a number. All titles are feline names.
* outlines-with-actions.pdf: mixture of explicit destinations,
named destinations, goto actions with explicit destinations, and
goto actions with named destinations; uses /Dests key in names
dictionary. Each page has Salad and a number. All titles are
silly words. One destination is an indirect object.
* outlines-with-old-root-dests.pdf: like outlines-with-actions
except it uses the PDF-1.1 /Dests dictionary for named
destinations, and each page has Soup and a number. Also pages are
numbered with upper-case Roman numerals starting with 0. All
titles are silly words preceded by a bullet.
2017-07-28 03:49:46 +00:00
Soon
====
2018-03-02 02:24:34 +00:00
* Figure out how to render Gajić correctly in the PDF version of the
qpdf manual.
2013-06-15 17:36:58 +00:00
* Add method to push inheritable resources to a single page by
walking up and copying without overwrite. Above logic will also be
sufficient to fix the limitation in
QPDFObjectHandle::getPageImages(). Maybe add a method to get the
effective resources for a page without modifying the page and then
implement both changes in terms of that method.
2013-12-15 15:08:51 +00:00
* Support user-pluggable stream filters. This would enable external
code to provide interpretation for filters that are missing from
2018-01-14 01:18:28 +00:00
qpdf. Make it possible for user-provided filters to override
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built-in filters. Make sure that the pluggable filters can be
prioritized so that we can poll all registered filters to see
whether they are capable of filtering a particular stream.
2013-03-11 00:32:40 +00:00
2017-08-16 10:26:31 +00:00
* If possible, consider adding CCITT3, CCITT4, or any other easy
filters. For some reference code that we probably can't use but may
be handy anyway, see
2013-04-04 18:13:51 +00:00
http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/ps/sdk/index_archive.html
2013-03-11 00:32:40 +00:00
* If possible, support the following types of broken files:
- Files that have no whitespace token after "endobj" such that
endobj collides with the start of the next object
- See ../misc/broken-files
Next ABI
========
Do these things next time we have to break binary compatibility
* Pl_Buffer's internal structure is not right for what it does. It
was modified for greater efficiency, but it was done in a way that
preserved binary compatibility, so the implementation is a bit
convoluted.
2018-01-14 01:18:28 +00:00
Lexical
=======
2018-02-17 18:36:41 +00:00
* Make it possible to run the lexer (tokenizer) over a whole file
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such that the following things would be possible:
* Rewrite fix-qdf in C++ so that there is no longer a runtime perl
dependency
* Make it possible to replace all strings in a file lexically even
on badly broken files. Ideally this should work files that are
lacking xref, have broken links, etc., and ideally it should work
with encrypted files if possible. This should go through the
streams and strings and replace them with fixed or random
characters, preferably, but not necessarily, in a manner that
works with fonts. One possibility would be to detect whether a
string contains characters with normal encoding, and if so, use
0x41. If the string uses character maps, use 0x01. The output
should otherwise be unrelated to the input. This could be built
after the filtering and tokenizer rewrite and should be done in a
manner that takes advantage of the other lexical features. This
sanitizer should also clear metadata and replace images.
Page splitting/merging
======================
* Update page splitting and merging to handle document-level
constructs with page impact such as interactive forms and article
threading. Check keys in the document catalog for others, such as
outlines, page labels, thumbnails, and zones. For threads,
Subramanyam provided a test file; see ../misc/article-threads.pdf.
Email Q-Count: 431864 from 2009-11-03.
General
=======
2017-11-27 21:49:37 +00:00
NOTE: Some items in this list refer to files in my personal home
directory or that are otherwise not publicly accessible. This includes
things sent to me by email that are specifically not public. Even so,
I find it useful to make reference to them in this list
* Pl_TIFFPredictor is pretty slow.
2018-04-15 22:45:11 +00:00
* Some test cases on bad fails fail because qpdf is unable to find
the root dictionary when it fails to read the trailer. Recovery
could find the root dictionary and even the info dictionary in
other ways. In particular, issue-202.pdf can be opened by evince,
and there's no real reason that qpdf couldn't be made to be able to
recover that file as well.
2017-11-27 21:49:37 +00:00
* Audit every place where qpdf allocates memory to see whether there
are cases where malicious inputs could cause qpdf to attempt to
grab very large amounts of memory. Certainly there are cases like
this, such as if a very highly compressed, very large image stream
is requested in a buffer. Hopefully normal input to output
filtering doesn't ever try to do this. QPDFWriter should be checked
carefully too. See also bugs/private/from-email-663916/
* Interactive form modification:
https://github.com/qpdf/qpdf/issues/213 contains a good discussion
of some ideas for adding methods to modify annotations and form
fields if we want to make it easier to support modifications to
interactive forms. Some of the ideas have been implemented, and
some of the probably never will be implemented, but it's worth a
read if there is an intention to work on this. In the issue, search
for "Regarding write functionality", and read that comment and the
responses to it.
* Form flattening: there is on-going work on this topic. The primary
tracking issue is https://github.com/qpdf/qpdf/issues/72, and there
has also been discussion in private email threads. My notes are
summarized in ../misc/form-flattening/README (not publicly
accessible), but all important information is in issues in github.
The non-public items in my notes are transcripts of discussions
with a google summer of code student who was working on the issue.
These notes likely have low value at this point, but I have saved
them to review in case form flattening ever moves into the qpdf
library from external tools where it is currently being
implemented. Note that flattening forms with appearance streams is
relatively straightforward, but many PDF files don't have
appearance streams and leave rendering of the form fields to the
viewer. Handling this in the general case is probably out of scope
for what will be in qpdf in the foreseeable future, particularly in
the area of embedding and subsetting fonts.
2017-11-27 21:49:37 +00:00
* Look at ~/Q/pdf-collection/forms-from-appian/
* Look at Travis-CI for qpdf. See email from Travis-CI in pending.
2018-05-05 21:42:58 +00:00
* https://github.com/qpdf/qpdf/pull/172 contains information about
running through MacPorts's CI.
2017-08-07 14:26:02 +00:00
* Consider adding "uninstall" target to makefile. It should only
uninstall what it installed, which means that you must run
uninstall from the version you ran install with. It would only be
supported for the toolchains that support the install target
(libtool).
* Figure out how to find Visual Studio in Windows registry and see if
I can get it to work with make so I can simplify creation of
Windows releases.
* Provide support in QPDFWriter for writing incremental updates.
Provide support in qpdf for preserving incremental updates. The
goal should be that QDF mode should be fully functional for files
with incremental updates including fix_qdf.
Note that there's nothing that says an indirect object in one
update can't refer to an object that doesn't appear until a later
update. This means that QPDF has to treat indirect null objects
differently from how it does now. QPDF drops indirect null objects
that appear as members of arrays or dictionaries. For arrays, it's
handled in QPDFWriter where we make indirect nulls direct. This is
in a single if block, and nothing else in the code cares about it.
We could just remove that if block and not break anything except a
few test cases that exercise the current behavior. For
dictionaries, it's more complicated. In this case,
QPDF_Dictionary::getKeys() ignores all keys with null values, and
hasKey() returns false for keys that have null values. We would
probably want to make QPDF_Dictionary able to handle the special
case of keys that are indirect nulls and basically never have it
drop any keys that are indirect objects.
If we make a change to have qpdf preserve indirect references to
null objects, we have to note this in ChangeLog and in the release
notes since this will change output files. We did this before when
we stopped flattening scalar references, so this is probably not a
big deal. We also have to make sure that the testing for this
handles non-trivial cases of the targets of indirect nulls being
replaced by real objects in an update. I'm not sure how this plays
with linearization, if at all. For cases where incremental updates
are not being preserved as incremental updates and where the data
is being folded in (as is always the case with qpdf now), none of
this should make any difference in the actual semantics of the
files.
2013-07-20 14:17:35 +00:00
* When decrypting files with /R=6, hash_V5 is called more than once
with the same inputs. Caching the results or refactoring to reduce
the number of identical calls could improve performance for
workloads that involve processing large numbers of small files.
* Consider providing a Windows installer for qpdf using NSIS.
2013-06-15 17:36:58 +00:00
* Consider adding a method to balance the pages tree. It would call
pushInheritedAttributesToPage, construct a pages tree from scratch,
and replace the /Pages key of the root dictionary with the new
tree.
* Secure random number generation could be made more efficient by
using a local static to ensure a single random device or crypt
provider as long as this can be done in a thread-safe fashion. In
the initial implementation, this is being skipped to avoid having
to add any dependencies on threading libraries.
2013-03-11 00:32:40 +00:00
* Study what's required to support savable forms that can be saved by
Adobe Reader. Does this require actually signing the document with
an Adobe private key? Search for "Digital signatures" in the PDF
spec, and look at ~/Q/pdf-collection/form-with-full-save.pdf, which
came from Adobe's example site.
* Consider the possibility of doing something locale-aware to support
2018-07-01 21:22:17 +00:00
non-ASCII passwords. Update documentation if this is done. Consider
implementing full Unicode password algorithms from newer encryption
formats. See ../misc/unicode-password*. If code is added to
properly encode Unicode passwords, figure out how to deal with
backward compatibility. Either require some additional flag to
decode the password or provide a `--raw-password` flag to suppress
decoding. While automatically encoding breaks backward
compatibility, it's probably the right behavior because the current
behavior is arguably a bug. Alternatively, if the password doesn't
work as a raw password and contains characters outside US-ASCII,
try various encoding methods to see if any work. See section
7.6.3.3, algorithms 2 and 2A, in the ISO spec for details. (This is
tracked in https://github.com/qpdf/qpdf/issues/215.)
* See if we can avoid preserving unreferenced objects in object
streams even when preserving the object streams.
* Provide APIs for embedded files. See *attachments*.pdf in test
suite. The private method findAttachmentStreams finds at least
cases for modern versions of Adobe Reader (>= 1.7, maybe earlier).
PDF Reference 1.7 section 3.10, "File Specifications", discusses
this.
2012-12-25 18:03:16 +00:00
A sourceforge user asks if qpdf can handle extracting and embedded
resources and references these tools, which may be useful as a
reference.
http://multivalent.sourceforge.net/Tools/pdf/Extract.html
http://multivalent.sourceforge.net/Tools/pdf/Embed.html
* The description of Crypt filters is unclear with respect to how to
use them to override /StmF for specific streams. I'm not sure
whether qpdf will do the right thing for any specific individual
2012-12-31 14:27:02 +00:00
streams that might have crypt filters, but I believe it does based
on my testing of a limited subset. The specification seems to imply
that only embedded file streams and metadata streams can have crypt
filters, and there are already special cases in the code to handle
those. Most likely, it won't be a problem, but someday someone may
find a file that qpdf doesn't work on because of crypt filters.
There is an example in the spec of using a crypt filter on a
metadata stream.
For now, we notice /Crypt filters and decode parameters consistent
with the example in the PDF specification, and the right thing
happens for metadata filters that happen to be uncompressed or
otherwise compressed in a way we can filter. This should handle
all normal cases, but it's more or less just a guess since I don't
have any test files that actually use stream-specific crypt filters
in them.
* The second xref stream for linearized files has to be padded only
because we need file_size as computed in pass 1 to be accurate. If
we were not allowing writing to a pipe, we could seek back to the
beginning and fill in the value of /L in the linearization
dictionary as an optimization to alleviate the need for this
padding. Doing so would require us to pad the /L value
individually and also to save the file descriptor and determine
whether it's seekable. This is probably not worth bothering with.
* The whole xref handling code in the QPDF object allows the same
object with more than one generation to coexist, but a lot of logic
assumes this isn't the case. Anything that creates mappings only
with the object number and not the generation is this way,
including most of the interaction between QPDFWriter and QPDF. If
we wanted to allow the same object with more than one generation to
coexist, which I'm not sure is allowed, we could fix this by
changing xref_table. Alternatively, we could detect and disallow
that case. In fact, it appears that Adobe reader and other PDF
viewing software silently ignores objects of this type, so this is
probably not a big deal.
* If we ever want to have check mode check the integrity of the free
list, this can be done by looking at the code from prior to the
object stream support of 4/5/2008. It's in an if (0) block and
there's a comment about it. There's also something about it in
qpdf.test -- search for "free table". On the other hand, the value
of doing this seems very low since no viewer seems to care, so it's
probably not worth it.
* QPDFObjectHandle::getPageImages() doesn't notice images in
inherited resource dictionaries. See comments in that function.
* Based on an idea suggested by user "Atom Smasher", consider
providing some mechanism to recover earlier versions of a file
embedded prior to appended sections.
2012-07-29 18:32:54 +00:00
* From a suggestion in bug 3152169, consider having an option to
re-encode inline images with an ASCII encoding.
* From github issue 2, provide more in-depth output for examining
2017-08-07 14:26:02 +00:00
hint stream contents. Consider adding on option to provide a
human-readable dump of linearization hint tables. This should
include improving the 'overflow reading bit stream' message as
reported in issue #2.