[DUG] printing to layers

[Phil Middlemiss]

OK. Thanks Kyley. I'm only gonna go to those lengths if I implement a 
specific "export to pdf" function (which ain't happening any time soon!).

Cheers,
Phil.

Kyley Harris wrote:

> 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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