qpdf/TODO

Next
====

*** ABI changes have been made.  build.mk has been updated.

 * 64-bit windows build, remaining steps

    - new external-libs have been built and copied into
      ~/Q/storage/releases/qpdf/external-libs.  Release is done in
      git.  Just need to upload when ready.  Remember to document that
      this version is needed for > 2.3.1.

    - update README-windows.txt docs to indicate that MSVC 2010 is the
      supported version and to update the information about mingw,
      including the need for the _FILE_OFFSET_BITS workaround on the
      32-bit version.

 * Document that your compiler has to support long long.

 * Make sure that the release notes call attention to the one API
   breaking change: removal of length from replaceStreamData.

 * Add a way to create new QPDFObjectHandles with a string
   representation of them, such as
   QPDFObjectHandle::parse("<< /a 1 /b 2 >>");

 * Document thread safety: One individual QPDF or QPDFWriter object
   can only be used by one thread at a time, but multiple threads can
   simultaneously use separate objects.

 * Write some documentation about the design of copyForeignObject.

 * copyForeignObject still to do:

    - qpdf command

      Command line could be something like (but not exactly)

      --pages [ --new ] { file [password] numeric-range ... } ... --

      The first file referenced would be the one whose other data would
      be preserved (like trailer, info, encryption, outlines, etc.).
      --new as first file would just use an empty file as the starting
      point.  Be explicit about whether outlines, etc., are handled.
      They are not handled initially.

      Example: to grab pages 1-5 from file1 and 11-15 from file2

      --pages file1.pdf 1-5 file2.pdf 11-15 --

      To implement this, we would remove all pages from file1 except
      pages 1 through 5.  Then we would take pages 11 through 15 from
      file2, copy them to the file, and add them as pages.

      (Look at ~/source/examples/perl/numrange.pl for numeric range
      parsing code.)

    - document that makeIndirectObject doesn't handle foreign objects
      automatically because copying a foreign object is a big enough
      deal that it should be explicit.  However addPages* does handle
      foreign page objects automatically.

    - Test /Outlines and see whether there's any point in handling
      them in the API.  Maybe just copying them over works.  What
      about command line tool?  Also think about page labels.

    - Tests through qpdf command line: copy pages from multiple PDFs
      starting with one PDF and also starting with empty.

 * Document --copy-encryption and --encryption-file-password in
   manual.  Mention that the first half of /ID as well as all the
   encryption parameters are copied.  Maybe mention about StrF and
   StrM with respect to AES here and also with encryption
   preservation.


Soon
====

 * See if I can support the new encryption formats mentioned in the
   open bug on sourceforge.  Check other sourceforge bugs.


General
=======

 * Look for %PDF header somewhere within the first 1024 bytes of the
   file.  Also accept headers of the form "%!PS−Adobe−N.n PDF−M.m".
   See Implementation notes 13 and 14 in appendix H of the PDF 1.7
   specification.  This is bug 3267974.

 * Update qpdf docs about non-ascii passwords.  See thread from
   2010-12-07,08 for details.

 * Consider impact of article threads on page splitting/merging.
   Subramanyam provided a test file; see ../misc/article-threads.pdf.
   Email Q-Count: 431864 from 2009-11-03.  Other things to consider:
   outlines, page labels, thumbnails, zones.  There are probably
   others.

 * See whether it's possible to remove the call to
   flattenScalarReferences.  I can't easily figure out why I do it,
   but removing it causes strange test failures in linearization.  I
   would have to study the optimization and linearization code to
   figure out why I added this to begin with and what in the code
   assumes it's the case.  For enqueueObject and unparseChild in
   QPDFWriter, simply removing the checks for indirect scalars seems
   sufficient.  Looking back at the branch in the apex epub
   repository, before flattening scalar references, there was special
   case code in QPDFWriter to avoid writing out indirect nulls.  It's
   still not obvious to me why I did it though.

   To pursue this, remove the call to flattenScalarReferences in
   QPDFWriter.cc and disable the logic_error exceptions for indirect
   scalars.  Just search for flattenScalarReferences in QPDFWriter.cc
   since the logic errors have comments that mention
   flattenScalarReferences.  Then run the test suite.  Several files
   that explicitly test flattening of scalar references fail, but the
   indirect scalars are properly preserved and written.  But then
   there are some linearized files that have a bunch of unreferenced
   objects that contain scalars.  Need to figure out what these are
   and why they're there.  Maybe they're objects that used to be
   stream lengths.  Probably we just need to make sure don't traverse
   through a stream's /Length stream when enqueueing stream
   dictionaries.  This could potentially happen with any object that
   QPDFWriter replaces when writing out files.  Such objects would be
   orphaned in the newly written file.  This could be fixed, but it
   may not be worth fixing.

   If flattenScalarReferences is removed, a new method will be needed
   for checking PDF files.

 * See if we can avoid preserving unreferenced objects in object
   streams even when preserving the object streams.

 * For debugging linearization bugs, consider adding an option to save
   pass 1 of linearization.  This code is sufficient.  Change the
   interface to allow specification of a pass1 file, which would
   change the behavior as in this patch.

------------------------------
Index: QPDFWriter.cc
===================================================================
--- QPDFWriter.cc	(revision 932)
+++ QPDFWriter.cc	(working copy)
@@ -1965,11 +1965,15 @@
 
     // Write file in two passes.  Part numbers refer to PDF spec 1.4.
 
+    FILE* XXX = 0;
     for (int pass = 1; pass <= 2; ++pass)
     {
 	if (pass == 1)
 	{
-	    pushDiscardFilter();
+//	    pushDiscardFilter();
+	    XXX = fopen("/tmp/pass1.pdf", "w");
+	    pushPipeline(new Pl_StdioFile("pass1", XXX));
+	    activatePipelineStack();
 	}
 
 	// Part 1: header
@@ -2204,6 +2208,8 @@
 
 	    // Restore hint offset
 	    this->xref[hint_id] = QPDFXRefEntry(1, hint_offset, 0);
+	    fclose(XXX);
+	    XXX = 0;
 	}
     }
 }
------------------------------

 * Handle embedded files.  PDF Reference 1.7 section 3.10, "File
   Specifications", discusses this.  Once we can definitely recongize
   all embedded files in a docucment, we can update the encryption
   code to handle it properly.  In QPDF_encryption.cc, search for
   cf_file.  Remove exception thrown if cf_file is different from
   cf_stream, and write code in the stream decryption section to use
   cf_file instead of cf_stream.  In general, add interfaces to get
   the list of embedded files and to extract them.  To handle general
   embedded files associated with the whole document, follow root ->
   /Names -> /EmbeddedFiles -> /Names to get to the file specification
   dictionaries.  Then, in each file specification dictionary, follow
   /EF -> /F to the actual stream.  There may be other places file
   specification dictionaries may appear, and there are also /RF keys
   with related files, so reread section 3.10 carefully.

 * 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
   streams that might have crypt filters.  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.

 * Pl_PNGFilter is only partially implemented.  If we ever decoded
   images, we'd have to finish implementing it along with the other
   filter decode parameters and types.  For just handling xref
   streams, there's really no need as it wouldn't make sense to use
   any kind of predictor other than 12 (PNG UP filter).

 * 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.

 * From a suggestion in bug 3152169, consisder having an option to
   re-encode inline images with an ASCII encoding.