Next ==== * Work in contrib/vc6. See email from stronghorse@tom.com 2.2 === * Add ability to create new streams or replace stream data. Consider stream data sources to include a file and offset, a buffer, or a some kind of callback mechanism. Find messages exchanged with Stefan Heinsen in August, 2009. He seems to like to send encrypted mail. (key 01FCC336) It appears that the only thing in the code that actually has to change is the QPDF_Stream object. When replacing stream data, we have to mutate the stream's dictionary to adjust /Filter, /DecodeParms, and /Length. We should probably just provide a method to replace the stream data, /Filter, and /DecodeParms all at once. If new values are provided, then pipeStreamData can use the new values, and we essentially then lose the original values. The code for replacing stream data would be to use getStreamData to get the old data and then to replace it all before any calls that would cause QPDFWriter to write new stream data. Will have to go through QPDF_Stream.cc carefully line by line to make sure everything is adjusted properly. * Add helper routines for manipulating page content streams. Operations should include ability to convert page contents from a stream to an array of streams and to append or prepend to the page contents. See message from stronghorse@tom.com ("Suggestion for qpdf") from 2010-06-09 and my response. Consider providing an example program that adds the line he suggests. * Add function to get all images. Should be able to return a map of pages to a list of images or something similar. Can use QPDFObjectHandle::getPageImages. Look at pdf-billinfo for ideas. * Look at page splitting. Subramanyam provided a test file; see ../misc/article-threads.pdf. Email Q-Count: 431864 from 2009-11-03. General ======= * Provide an option to copy encryption parameters from another file. This would make it possible to decrypt a file, manually work with it, and then re-encrypt it using the original encryption parameters including a possibly unknown owner password. * 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. * 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. Splitting by Pages ================== Although qpdf does not currently support splitting a file into pages, the work done for linearization covers almost all the work. To do page splitting. If this functionality is needed, study obj_user_to_objects and object_to_obj_users created in QPDF_optimization for ideas. It's quite possible that the information computed by calculateLinearizationData is actually sufficient to do page splitting in many circumstances. That code knows which objects are used by which pages, though it doesn't do anything page-specific with outlines, thumbnails, page labels, or anything else. Another approach would be to traverse only pages that are being output taking care not to traverse into the pages tree, and then to fabricate a new pages tree. Either way, care must be taken to handle other things such as outlines, page labels, thumbnails, threads, zones, etc. in a sensible way. This may include simply omitting information other than page content.