Plan for PDF bookmarks (and pdfmarks in general)

[K. H. Man]

Hi all,

Someone e-mailed me privately inquiring about the PDF bookmarks I
am working on; unfortunately, I could not reply directly as my ISP
has some of its IP blocks blacklisted (due to a less than great
abuse report response time...) but anyway, I thought I'll post a
detailed outline for everyone to comment. So here goes...

Basically, the plan is to fit all interactive elements (that won't
appear in print form) into a symbol, and these elements should be
more or less independent of the back end. Lout groups together
these elements (which may be scattered) and the back end processes
them into whatever is required by the output file format.
Practically, for now these elements are only used in PDF document
form, after distilling from PS generated by the PS back end.

Examples:

     @Mark
         type { information }
         key { Author }
     { Acme Associates }

     @Mark
         type { outline }
         depth { 1 }
         tag { title.page }
     <object>

"type" specifies the kind of interactive element. Other named
parameters are type-specific. <object> will reduce to literals.

"information" and "outline" are the two pdfmarks that I am
implementing. Unfortunately, I think slide transitions cannot be
specified with pdfmarks, so something like "animation" would
require a real PDF back end.

For general use, the book format/style can be optionally enhanced
to produce these elements automatically (that's the plan anyway.)
The other normal document styles will not have outlines enabled.

It has occurred to me that @Mark might be confused with Lout's
concept of marks. So, something else might be more appropriate,
perhaps @Interactive?

This is a preliminary design and feedback is welcome. I hope this
will help smooth out any kinks in the plan. It will be finally
subject to changes and approval by Jeff Kingston, of course.

PS. Lout's SF ranking is up to 82%... :-)
--
Cheers,
Kein-Hong Man (esq.)
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia