Quote:
Originally Posted by davr
Is it theoretically possible to do both text wrapping and native pdf output? That seems like it would be the best of both worlds -- smaller, higher quality files, while still getting the nifty reformatting. You can do something similar with the desktop adobe pdf reader (view->zoom->reflow), though it's not perfect, some formatting is lost.
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I've learned never to say anything is impossible. I was not aware Adobe had that option in their PDF reader--I'll have to check it out. The problem with the way I do native PDF output is that for each rectangular region I place on an output page, I render the entire source page (cropping out everything outside the crop box). This is a generally reliable method since I'm not trying to go inside each page stream and tinker with it. But if you used text re-flow, you'd then have hundreds of crop boxes (one for each word), and it would take a very long time to render each page. Plus, selecting and searching text would be a nightmare because even though the content outside the crop box is visibly eliminated, most readers/viewers still act as if the text is there anyway, so it would be like trying to select text on hundreds of overlaid pages. Trust me that you would not prefer this output. Bitmapped pages with OCR are a much better alternative. This is why I try to encourage the use of the "-mode" options which try to minimize the number of crop boxes used on each page. SoPdf limits itself to one per page, for example, which is ideal. There is more than one way to skin a cat, though, and I may not be using an optimal method, but for now it's what I've got. To go further I will have to understand more about PDF files.