Re: Plan for PDF bookmarks (and pdfmarks in general)

[Albert Kinderman]

K.H. and All:

I don't think my use of pdfmarks is covered in the two mark types that 
K.H. is working on.  I sometimes produce pdf's for posting on a website, 
and I want to have working links to url's in the pdf document.  When I 
last did it several years ago, it required taking the ps output of lout 
and editing it by hand to insert the pdfmark and the links.  I also had 
to use trial and error to set the clickable box around the text that I 
wanted to be the clickable link.

I guess I am asking for a type like

 @Mark
   type { url }
   url { http://sourceforge.net/projects/lout }
   color { blue }
{lout project page}

where the text "lout project page" would appear in-line in the text and 
be a blue colored link, as in

@PP
More information about Lout can be found at the
@Mark
     type { url }
   url { http://sourceforge.net/projects/lout }
   color { blue }
{lout project page}
at sourceforge.

Is it possible to include this type of mark?

Note, Vincent Tan discusses this and other marks in his PDF backend and 
notes, READMEPDF, that is distributed with lout.  I realize that K.H.'s 
goal is different, since his method would not use the -Z switch to lout, 
but produce ps with the pdfmarks embedded to pass to a pdf distiller.

Al

K. H. Man wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Someone e-mailed me privately inquiring about the PDF bookmarks I
> am working on; unfortunately, I could not reply directly as my ISP
> has some of its IP blocks blacklisted (due to a less than great
> abuse report response time...) but anyway, I thought I'll post a
> detailed outline for everyone to comment. So here goes...
>
> Basically, the plan is to fit all interactive elements (that won't
> appear in print form) into a symbol, and these elements should be
> more or less independent of the back end. Lout groups together
> these elements (which may be scattered) and the back end processes
> them into whatever is required by the output file format.
> Practically, for now these elements are only used in PDF document
> form, after distilling from PS generated by the PS back end.
>
> Examples:
>
>      @Mark
>          type { information }
>          key { Author }
>      { Acme Associates }
>
>      @Mark
>          type { outline }
>          depth { 1 }
>          tag { title.page }
>      <object>
>
> "type" specifies the kind of interactive element. Other named
> parameters are type-specific. <object> will reduce to literals.
>
> "information" and "outline" are the two pdfmarks that I am
> implementing. Unfortunately, I think slide transitions cannot be
> specified with pdfmarks, so something like "animation" would
> require a real PDF back end.
>
> For general use, the book format/style can be optionally enhanced
> to produce these elements automatically (that's the plan anyway.)
> The other normal document styles will not have outlines enabled.
>
> It has occurred to me that @Mark might be confused with Lout's
> concept of marks. So, something else might be more appropriate,
> perhaps @Interactive?
>
> This is a preliminary design and feedback is welcome. I hope this
> will help smooth out any kinks in the plan. It will be finally
> subject to changes and approval by Jeff Kingston, of course.
>
> PS. Lout's SF ranking is up to 82%... :-)