[pdf-devel] goals and motivations

[Ralph Giles]

Hi,

Dave Crossland pointed out the GNU PDF project to me today. It's great 
to see more Free Software work in the PDF space!

I'm a little puzzled about what you're writing though. The "Goals and 
motivations" page has lots of information about why you'd want a PDF 
implementation, but nothing about why you're writing a new one, or what 
your goals are. There's already Ghostscript (GPLv2) and libpoppler/xpdf 
(GPLv2+) on the rendering side, and libcairo (LGPL2.1/MPL1.1) on the 
generation side.

There is a need for a low level pdf object and stream manipulation 
library. Your roadmap doesn't mention a graphics library, so perhaps 
that's your intent, but then why do you talk about image-only filters 
like JBIG2 and JPX? And on the front page you mention implementing 
support for PDF 1.7 and some other rather large specs.

I also fear GPL will be an unpopular license for such a library.

Anyway, I'm just curious about the larger plan was.

 -r