qpdf/TODO

Candidates for upcoming release
===============================

* Enable discussions in github. See if any open issues should be there.

* Open "next" issues
  * bugs
    * #473: zsh completion with directories
      * Investigate how serverless does completion
  * Non-bugs
    * #436: parsing of document with form xobject
    * #488: allow specification of jpeg compression quality; may also
      need an option to recompress jpeg

* Json mode enhancements:
  * Put something in the json that makes it easier to find the
    definition of an object without breaking compatibility
  * See if the objects part can be sorted by object number

* QPDFObjectHandle::pipeContentStreams calls finish() after each
  stream. In some code paths, Pl_Concatenate is used, which suppresses
  that, but in other code paths, it's not used, and the library relies
  on the behavior of finish() being called. Then there's the issue of
  nested Pl_Concatenate pipelines -- calling manualFinish() on the top
  one doesn't call manualFinish() on the lower ones, and there are no
  exposed methods that allow us to apply things down the pipeline
  stack, so it's hard to fix this without changing the API (at least
  making Pipeline::getNext() public, which may be undesirable). To see
  this problem in action, stick a Pl_Concatenate in front of the
  pipeline in pipeContentStreams and observe the test failure. One
  solution might be to add an additional argument indicating whether
  or not to delay calling finish() until the end. See comments on
  QPDFPageObjectHelper::filterPageContents,
  QPDFObjectHandle::filterPageContents, and
  QPDFObjectHandle::pipeContentStreams

* Remember to check work `qpdf` project for private issues
  * file with very slow page extraction
  * big page even with --remove-unreferenced-resources=yes, even with --empty
  * optimize image failure because of colorspace

* Externalize inline images doesn't walk into form XObjects. In
  general:

  * Check QPDFPageObjectHelper and see what can be applied to form
    XObjects. Maybe think about generalizing it to work with form
    XObjects.

  * There is an increasing amount of logic in qpdf.cc that should
    probably move into the library. This includes externalizing inline
    images and page splitting as those operations become more
    elaborate, particularly with handling of form XObjects.

* See if the tokenizer is a performance bottleneck and, if so,
  optimize it. We might end up with a high-performance tokenizer that
  has a different interface but still ultimately creates the same
  tokens.

Fuzz Errors
===========

* https://bugs.chromium.org/p/oss-fuzz/issues/detail?id=<N>

* Ignoring these:
  * Timeout: 15471, 17630
  * Out of memory: 15470

GitHub Actions
==============

* Actions are triggered on push to main and master. When we eventually
  rename master to main, make sure the reference to master is removed
  from .github/workflows/*.yml.

* At the time of migrating from Azure Pipelines to GitHub Actions
  (2020-10), there was no standard test result publisher (to replace
  the PublishTestResults@2 task). There are some third-party actions,
  but I'd rather not depend on them. Keep an eye open for this coming
  to GitHub Actions.

External Libraries
==================

Current state (10.0.2):

* qpdf/external-libs repository builds external-libs on a schedule.
  It detects and downloads the latest versions of zlib, jpeg, and
  openssl and creates source and binary distribution zip files in an
  artifact called "distribution".

* Releases in qpdf/external-libs are made manually. They contain
  qpdf-external-libs-{bin,src}.zip.

* The qpdf build finds the latest non-prerelease release and downloads
  the qpdf-external-libs-*.zip files from the releases in the setup
  stage.

* To upgrade to a new version of external-libs, create a new release
  of qpdf/external-libs (see README-maintainer in external-libs) from
  the distribution artifact of the most recent successful build after
  ensuring that it works.

Desired state:

* The qpdf/external-libs repository should create release candidates.
  Ideally, every scheduled run would make its zip files available. A
  personal access token with actions:read scope for the
  qpdf/external-libs repository is required to download the artifact
  from an action run, and qpdf/qpdf's secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN doesn't
  have this access. We could create a service account for this
  purpose. As an alternative, we could have a draft release in
  qpdf/external-libs that the qpdf/external-libs build could update
  with each candidate. It may also be possible to solve this by
  developing a simple GitHub app.

* Scheduled runs of the qpdf build in the qpdf/qpdf repository (not a
  fork or pull request) could download external-libs from the release
  candidate area instead of the latest stable release. Pushes to the
  build branch should still use the latest release so it always
  matches the main branch.

* Periodically, we would create a release of external-libs from the
  release candidate zip files. This could be done safely because we
  know the latest qpdf works with it. This could be done at least
  before every release of qpdf, but potentially it could be done at
  other times, such as when a new dependency version is available or
  after some period of time.

Other notes:

* The external-libs branch in qpdf/qpdf was never documented. We might
  be able to get away with deleting it.

* See README-maintainer in qpdf/external-libs for information on
  creating a release. This could be at least partially scripted in a
  way that works for the qpdf/qpdf repository as well since they are
  very similar.

ABI Changes
===========

This is a list of changes to make next time there is an ABI change.
Comments appear in the code prefixed by "ABI"

* Merge two versions of QPDFObjectHandle::makeDirect per comment

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.

 * 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
   * see also comments in issue 343

   Note: original implementation of bookmark preservation for split
   pages caused a very high performance hit. The problem was
   introduced in 313ba081265f69ac9a0324f9fe87087c72918191 and reverted
   in the commit that adds this paragraph. The revert includes marking
   a few tests cases as $td->EXPECT_FAILURE. When properly coded, the
   test cases will need to be adjusted to only include the parts of
   the outlines that are actually copied. The tests in question are
   "split page with outlines". When implementing properly, ensure that
   the performance is not adversely affected by timing split-pages on
   a large file with complex outlines such as the PDF specification.

   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.

   If outline handling is significantly improved, see
   ../misc/bad-outlines/bad-outlines.pdf and email:
   https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/rfc822msgid%3A02aa01d3d013%249f766990%24de633cb0%24%40mono.hr)

 * Form fields: should be similar to outlines.

Performance
===========

As described in https://github.com/qpdf/qpdf/issues/401, there was
great performance degradation between qpdf 7.1.1 and 9.1.1. Doing a
bisect between dac65a21fb4fa5f871e31c314280b75adde89a6c and
release-qpdf-7.1.1, I found several commits that damaged performance.
I fixed some of them to improve performance by about 70% (as measured
by saying that old times were 170% of new times). The remaining
commits that broke performance either can't be correct because they
would re-introduce an old bug or aren't worth correcting because of
the high value they offer relative to a relatively low penalty. For
historical reference, here are the commits. The numbers are the time
in seconds on the machine I happened to be using of splitting the
first 100 pages of PDF32000_2008.pdf 20 times and taking an average
duration.

Commits that broke performance:

* d0e99f195a987c483bbb6c5449cf39bee34e08a1 -- object description and
  context: 0.39 -> 0.45
* a01359189b32c60c2d55b039f7aefd6c3ce0ebde (minus 313ba08) -- fix
  dangling references: 0.55 -> 0.6
* e5f504b6c5dc34337cc0b316b4a7b1fca7e614b1 -- sparse array: 0.6 -> 0.62

Other intermediate steps that were previously fixed:

* 313ba081265f69ac9a0324f9fe87087c72918191 -- copy outlines into
  split: 0.55 -> 4.0
* a01359189b32c60c2d55b039f7aefd6c3ce0ebde -- fix dangling references:
  4.0 -> 9.0

This commit fixed the awful problem introduced in 313ba081:

* a5a016cdd26a8e5c99e5f019bc30d1bdf6c050a2 -- revert outline
  preservation: 9.0 -> 0.6

Note that the fix dangling references commit had a much worse impact
prior to removing the outline preservation, so I also measured its
impact in isolation.

A few important lessons:

* Indirection through PointerHolder<Members> is expensive, and should
  not be used for things that are created and destroyed frequently
  such as QPDFObjectHandle and QPDFObject.
* Traversal of objects is expensive and should be avoided where
  possible.

Future ideas:

* Look at places in the code where object traversal is being done and,
  where possible, try to avoid it entirely or at least avoid ever
  traversing the same objects multiple times.
* Avoid attaching too much metadata to objects and object handles
  since those have to get copied around a lot.

Also, it turns out that PointerHolder is more performant than
std::shared_ptr.

Analytics
=========

Consider features that make it easier to detect certain patterns in
PDF files. The information below could be computed using an external
program that reads the existing json, but if it's useful enough, we
could add it directly to the json output.

 * Add to "pages" in the json:
   * "inheritsresources": bool; whether there are any inherited
     attributes from ancestor page tree nodes
   * "sharedresources": a list of indirect objects that are
     "/Resources" dictionaries or "XObject" resource dictionary subkeys
     of either the page itself or of any form XObject referenced by the
     page.

 * Add to "objectinfo" in json: "directpagerefcount": the number of
   pages that directly reference this object (i.e., you can find an
   indirect reference to the object in the page dictionary without
   traversing over any indirect objects)

General
=======

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.

 * If I do more with json, take a look at this C++ header-only JSON
   library: https://github.com/nlohmann/json/releases

 * Flattening of form XObjects seems like something that would be
   useful in the library. We are seeing more cases of completely valid
   PDF files with form XObjects that cause problems in other software.
   Flattening of form XObjects could be a useful way to work around
   those issues or to prepare files for additional processing, making
   it possible for users of the qpdf library to not be concerned about
   form XObjects. This could be done recursively; i.e., we could have a
   method to embed a form XObject into whatever contains it, whether
   that is a form XObject or a page. This would require more
   significant interpretation of the content stream. We would need a
   test file in which the placement of the form XObject has to be in
   the right place, e.g., the form XObject partially obscures earlier
   code and is partially obscured by later code. Keys in the resource
   dictionary may need to be changed -- create test cases with lots of
   duplicated/overlapping keys.

 * Add support for writing name and number trees

 * Figure out how to render Gajić correctly in the PDF version of the
   qpdf manual.

 * Investigate whether there is a way to automate the memory checker
   tests for Windows.

 * Part of closed_file_input_source.cc is disabled on Windows because
   of odd failures. It might be worth investigating so we can fully
   exercise this in the test suite. That said, ClosedFileInputSource
   is exercised elsewhere in qpdf's test suite, so this is not that
   pressing.

 * 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
   http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/ps/sdk/index_archive.html

 * 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

 * Additional form features
   * set value from CLI? Specify title, and provide way to
     disambiguate, probably by giving objgen of field

 * 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 preserved by write, so object ID lookup
     has to be done separately for each invocation
   * you don't have to specify length for streams
   * you only have to specify filtering for streams if providing raw data

 * Pl_TIFFPredictor is pretty slow.

 * Support for handling file names with Unicode characters in Windows
   is incomplete. qpdf seems to support them okay from a functionality
   standpoint, and the right thing happens if you pass in UTF-8
   encoded filenames to QPDF library routines in Windows (they are
   converted internally to wchar_t*), but file names are encoded in
   UTF-8 on output, which doesn't produce nice error messages or
   output on Windows in some cases.

 * If we ever wanted to do anything more with character encoding, see
   ../misc/character-encoding/, which includes machine-readable dump
   of table D.2 in the ISO-32000 PDF spec. This shows the mapping
   between Unicode, StandardEncoding, WinAnsiEncoding,
   MacRomanEncoding, and PDFDocEncoding.

 * Some test cases on bad files 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.

 * 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.

 * Look at ~/Q/pdf-collection/forms-from-appian/

 * 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).

 * 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.

 * 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 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.

 * 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. See also
   ../misc/digital-sign-from-trueroad/. If digital signatures are
   implemented, update the docs on crypto providers, which mention
   that this may happen in the future.

 * 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.

   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.

 * 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. 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. There are multiple calls to stopOnError in
   the linearization checking code. Ideally, these should not
   terminate checking. It would require re-acquiring an understanding
   of all that code to make the checks more robust. In particular,
   it's hard to look at the code and quickly determine what is a true
   logic error and what could happen because of malformed user input.
   See also ../misc/linearization-errors.

 * If I ever decide to make appearance stream-generation aware of
   fonts or font metrics, see email from Tobias with Message-ID
   <5C3C9C6C.8000102@thax.hardliners.org> dated 2019-01-14.

 * Consider creating a sanitizer to make it easier for people to send
   broken files. Now that we have json mode, this is probably no
   longer worth doing. Here is the previous idea, possibly implemented
   by making it possible to run the lexer (tokenizer) over a whole
   file. 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.

 * Here are some notes about having stream data providers modify
   stream dictionaries. I had wanted to add this functionality to make
   it more efficient to create stream data providers that may
   dynamically decide what kind of filters to use and that may end up
   modifying the dictionary conditionally depending on the original
   stream data. Ultimately I decided not to implement this feature.
   This paragraph describes why.

   * When writing, the way objects are placed into the queue for
     writing strongly precludes creation of any new indirect objects,
     or even changing which indirect objects are referenced from which
     other objects, because we sometimes write as we are traversing
     and enqueuing objects. For non-linearized files, there is a risk
     that an indirect object that used to be referenced would no
     longer be referenced, and whether it was already written to the
     output file would be based on an accident of where it was
     encountered when traversing the object structure. For linearized
     files, the situation is considerably worse. We decide which
     section of the file to write an object to based on a mapping of
     which objects are used by which other objects. Changing this
     mapping could cause an object to appear in the wrong section, to
     be written even though it is unreferenced, or to be entirely
     omitted since, during linearization, we don't enqueue new objects
     as we traverse for writing.

   * There are several places in QPDFWriter that query a stream's
     dictionary in order to prepare for writing or to make decisions
     about certain aspects of the writing process. If the stream data
     provider has the chance to modify the dictionary, every piece of
     code that gets stream data would have to be aware of this. This
     would potentially include end user code. For example, any code
     that called getDict() on a stream before installing a stream data
     provider and expected that dictionary to be valid would
     potentially be broken. As implemented right now, you must perform
     any modifications on the dictionary in advance and provided
     /Filter and /DecodeParms at the time you installed the stream
     data provider. This means that some computations would have to be
     done more than once, but for linearized files, stream data
     providers are already called more than once. If the work done by
     a stream data provider is especially expensive, it can implement
     its own cache.

   The example examples/pdf-custom-filter.cc demonstrates the use of
   custom stream filters. This includes a custom pipeline, a custom
   stream filter, as well as modification of a stream's dictionary to
   include creation of a new stream that is referenced from
   /DecodeParms.