History of the Project

Name The new name is PDFtalk. The first version was called PDF4Smalltalk. With the name comes a domain with a wiki dedicated to the library: wiki.pdftalk.de.

Typing The heard of the “PDF engine” is the typing system which allows the assignment of Smalltalk classes to raw PDF objects. The new version has a redesigned type system where PDF types are properly modeled independent from the Smalltalk class hierarchy. This allows to rename classes freely (i.e. adding prefixes) without affecting PDF types. Also, boxing of some simple objects like "null" and booleans is not necessary anymore. Instead the existing classes can be declared as PDF types. More on this in the release notes.

PDFtalk for Gemstone The new release was triggered by a contract to port the library to Gemstone (thanks to HTS and Bob Nemec). A talk about this was held at ESUG 2017: "PDFtalk for Gemstone" (slides are here).

Gemstone Fileout A VisualWorks to Gemstone translation tool. This tool, with project specific code transformation declarations, creates a Gemstone filein. Used to create the Gemstone PDFtalkLibrary from the Values package and PDFtalk bundle.

Both new projects are open source with MIT licence.

Image conversions are faster for non-optimized cases. The fallback pixel-by-pixel conversion was changed: first convert the image to the screen representation and then to PDF (which is optimized).

There are also some bug fixes concerning fonts and images using multiple filters.

And for the UI: the [left arrow] in the PDFExplorer tree view now moves the selection to the parent when not opened. To me this is the expected behavior for tree views.

A comprehensive implementation for using Smalltalk images with PDFs was added to the PDF4Smalltalk library (see images). This overdue feature was realized thanks to the encouragement of Bob Nemec, author of Report4PDF, and the generous funding from his employer, the Canadian engineering company HTS.

Gitorius is closing down. Therefore I decided to use my own webspace to host the PDF4Smalltalk documentation.

In the last 3 years, nothing much happened except for the occasional bug fix. But recently, I am more active again.

I am working on the ContentStream whith, hopefully, leads to higher level objects like texts or graphical elements instead of a stream of graphics operators.

Since the project is on my own server now, I hope that I will program and write a bit more…

This project was hosted at Origo until the end of Mai 2012. The wiki was recreated on Gitorius. Other contents was preserved as follows:

• The Blog was recreated on this wiki at blog. Until another place is found to host the blog, the old contents is preserved here for reference.
• The static Forum contents has been reposted on the discussion list and can be seen in the archive.
• The issue tracker was not used much… so I dropped it with the old contents.

Published the first version as open source.

Started to write documentation at Origo.

Started to implement the PDF specification as replacement for the PostScript output module for smallCharts.