Re: gpdf

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

On Wed, 2003-02-12 at 15:40, Martin Kretzschmar wrote:
> Michael Meeks wrote:
> > On Tue, 2003-02-11 at 18:30, Bill Haneman wrote:
> > > Jeff mentioned accessibility in the gpdf context.
> > 
> > 	Of course, gpdf (based on the xpdf codebase) could - theoretically, do
> > this quite well, where it would be hard for 'ggv' to do this.
> > 
> > 	AFAIK Martin is still doing an excellent job on gpdf, so you'd do best
> > to speak to him about where to hack I imagine.
> 
> gpdf uses the gnome-print preview for display. I don't know much about
> its a11y. I haven't looked at the resolutions for Bug 90313 and 96802
> (print-preview in HighContrast/LowContrast themes). Maybe they help
> gpdf.

Yes, basically it should be possible (though probably not the default)
;-)  to use base_gc and text_gc from GtkStyle when rendering the preview
text, rather than using WYSIWYG colors.

> 
> And the xpdf codebase has pdf-to-text code. Maybe the text version of a
> page can be associated with the rendered preview. Would that help?

This might help a *lot*, particularly if the text could be exported by
the viewing widget via the AtkText interface.  

> About using PDFs a11y features: gpdf doesn't have direct access to the
> pdf content stream (where we could find a11y info) yet because not even
> the features of xpdf's rendering abstraction are implemented in gpdf. So
> the to be written code would have to dig in xpdf's data structures. 

I didn't think xpdf has any support for this yet, so not only would we
need to rummage in xpdf's data, we'd need to add support for the
accessibility PDF extensions to xpdf itself.  But long-term, this is
what needs to happen IMO, or else we ditch PDF altogether as a document
format (at least from the content creation POV).  Your comments about
xpdf having PDF-to-text support however makes me wonder, perhaps there
is some support for the a11y extensions there after all?

At any rate, if we can get text out of the PDF document, it would be of
great use/interest to accessibility.

- Bill


> 	Martin
-- 
Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>