qpdf/TODO

4.2.0
=====

 * New interfaces have been added.

 * Suggestion from user: allow merging entire files without specifying
   1-z as page number, e.g., qpdf --empty --pages a*.pdf -- b.pdf

 * Suggestion from a user: add an command-line option to show the
   number of pages.


4.3.0
=====

 * Provide an option for QPDFWriter to preserve unreferenced objects
   when writing out a file.

 * If possible, support user-pluggable stream filters.  This would
   enable external code to provide interpretation for filters that are
   missing from qpdf.

 * If possible, consider adding RLE, CCITT3, CCITT4, or any other easy
   filters.  For some reference code that we probably can't use but
   may be handy anyway, see
   http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/ps/sdk/index_archive.html

 * If possible, support the following types of broken files:

    - Files that lack %%EOF at the end but otherwise have a valid
      startxref near the end

    - Files that have no whitespace token after "endobj" such that
      endobj collides with the start of the next object

    - Files with individual corrupted streams.  Just leave the streams
      unfiltered after giving a warning, or maybe do something else
      like applying as many of the filters as possible, etc.
      QPDFWriter can have some kind of retry mechanism on streams
      where filtering fails after filterable returns true.

    - Files whose PDF header is malformed, perhaps with no version
      number (as literally %PDF-a.b).  Maybe keep track of features to
      try to infer a version based on encryption formats and object
      streams.

    - For really hard errors like corrupted streams where there is
      virtually guaranteed to be loss, maybe require an additional
      option to tell qpdf that it's okay to continue and treat those
      as warnings.  Probably need separate options for each type of
      error plus a generic tryReallyHard kind of method that enables
      them all.  Then the qpdf command-line tool can have a single
      flag that enables all supported aggressive recovery techniques.

    - See ../misc/broken-files



Next ABI change
===============

 * Remove QPDF::getCompressibleObjects()

 * For public QPDF methods that are only public so QPDFWriter can
   call them, make them private and provide a nested caller class with
   QPDFWriter as a friend for access just like is being done now for
   some other methods.  This will reduce the risk that future changes
   in the interface between QPDFWriter and QPDF will result in
   breaking ABI changes.


General
=======

 * Consider providing a Windows installer for qpdf using NSIS.

 * Improve the random number seed to make it more secure so that we
   have stronger random numbers, particularly when multiple files are
   generated in the same second.  This code may need to be
   OS-specific.  Probably we should add a method in QUtil to seed with
   a strong random number and call this automatically the first time
   QUtil::random() is called.

 * 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
   non-ASCII passwords.  Update documentation if this is done.
   Consider implementing full Unicode password algorithms from newer
   encryption formats.

 * 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 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 = QUtil::safe_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;
 	}
     }
 }
------------------------------

 * 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.

   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
   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.

 * 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, consider having an option to
   re-encode inline images with an ASCII encoding.

 * From github issue 2, provide more in-depth output for examining
   hint stream contents.