[DUG] printing to layers

[Kyley Harris]

PDF has layers more for the ability for the viewer to have flexability, 
not the printer. So If you create a map as a PDF, you could have Street 
vector information as a seperate layer. When it goes to print, the 
viewer is printing normal stuff based on layer visiblity and Z order. 
Printers are pretty dumb. It is basically up to your data to be stored 
as layers, and you choose what layers to print and when. In reality, 
like Photoshop, you would want to alphablend the layers, and then print 
one version to the printer. (which is what the PDF also does).

I am not sure if the acrobat print driver would know squat about 
layering. I have found that other 3rd party ones do a much better job. I 
have my own pdf generator that I wrote which handles the simple concepts 
of a TCanvas such as text, line, rectangle, bitmaps, new page. adding 
layers is not really hard. a pdf document is just a flat file database 
using object encapsulation. perhaps look at PDFtoolkit from e-gnostice

Phil Middlemiss wrote:

> Acrobat 6 introduced "layers" into a PDF - which is nice, but from a 
> developers point of view, we generally have generic code for printing 
> and rely on the print drivers to do the hard work. However, EPS has 
> always had layers (AFIK) and so perhaps there is a generic way to 
> indicate a new layer that would be ignored by the print driver if not 
> supported, but nicely recognised by Adobe's acrobat print driver to 
> create a new layer.
>
> I *could* try and wade my way through the mind-numbing Adobe PDF 
> specification, but thought it was worth asking here if anyone has done 
> this already?
>
> Cheers,
> Phil.
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