Tuesday, February 3, 2009

XRef stream vs xref

That didn't take long! I've been urged to compromise on legacy features already.


Members of the PDF/A camp, including one of my software engineers (Sergey), are concerned that dropping the old style xref tables means that no PDF/A-1 file can possibly be PDF/D compliant.  I was looking forward with the hope that PDF/A-2 support would be good enough but they disagree.

So, I've decided to take a step back and allow old style xref tables to exist in PDF/D but with plenty of constraints:
  • only a single xref table (no Prev field in Trailer)
  • no hybrid files (no XRefStm in trailer)
  • no deleted objects (no f type in the xref table except for the first entry)
  • generation numbers always zero
  • only one section (implies consecutive object numbers starting at 1)
These simplifications mean that the end of the PDF file will always look like some variant of this:

xref
0 4
0000000000 65535 f 
0000000009 00000 n 
0000000122 00000 n 
0000000175 00000 n 
trailer
<<
  /Size 4
  /Root 2 0 R
>>
startxref
226
%%EOF

The other valid PDF/D entries in the Trailer are ID, Info and Encrypt.

As with my earlier PDF/D constraints, incremental updates and the dead objects that come with them are eliminated. So is linearization.

There you have it: the minimum required functionality of old style xref tables to make it possible for PDF/A-1 files to be PDF/D compliant.

2 comments:

  1. Disallowing linearization is a BAD IDEA! Linearization, while complex, is a VERY USEFUL (and underused) feature of PDF, especially when serving large documents on the web.

    I'd rather see you find an alternative than kill it entirely.

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