Laurent S. wrote:

A treacherous tailwind blowing in the direction of PDF
has been encountered by many.

And unfortunately I have not yet solved several
problems regarding working with, and going to/from
PDF.

I agree that the pricey Illustrator is fairly good at
importing and exporting numerous other formats. But
few of your your collaborators will have it.

For me *batch* conversions of high precision bitmaps
to/from PDF have been elusive. They haven't worked
with Illustrator. (But maybe there is a plugin for
that?) However a friend suggested that Open
Office(=OO) may offer some good batch solutions.  Here
is his recipe for extracting 'all' the bitmaps from
one PDF file.

  > 1. Load the PDF file into OO.
  > 2. Save current document as ODF Drawing (*.ODG).
  > 3. Close document.
  > 4. Rename *.ODG file as *.ZIP.
  > 5. Unzip *.ZIP ---> all pages at once

I get all PNG and TIFF-G4 graphics it seems. Intact.
But not yet JPG... . I abhore the hazy JPGs that T.Lemke's
GraphicsConverter imports from PDF.

There's hope of going the other way using OO, since
the ODG (=Open Office Graphics) format is an XML and
more modern than PDF. If anyone has deeper knowlege of
ODG, I'll be listening.

What about iWork's "Pages" application in place of
Open office?

Another tack:- Metapost is a  pretty good 2-dim,
programmable, vectorial,  graphics language, from
which one can get to PDF. It is by John Hobby. Pierre
could probably have his FB programs write metapost
files. There's a distribution of Metapost in A.
Trevorrow's OzTeX:

    http://www.trevorrow.com/oztex/#sysreq

It outputs PS and EPS, from which one can get to PDF.
------------------------------

... but I don't understand what exactly he is going to tell us.

1.
What does
"conversions of high precision bitmaps to/from PDF"
mean, or where is the exact problem?

There is no problem at all in using (not converting) arbitrary pixel 
images in PDFs. As far as I know there is no resolution limit, at 
least I've never encountered one. Of course I speak of Adobe Acrobat 
Professional and the associated Distiller with the properly set 
presets. Presets, besides others, define what kind of resolution and 
compression is used for the final PDF doc. You can precisely specify 
all relevant parameters.

Extraction may be a different issue but I never encountered problems 
when saving a PDF containing pixel graphics as TIFF in Adobe Acrobat 
Professional. In the PDFs were distilled with JPG compression then 
you will get back what remains after decompression and, as we all 
know that depends on the compression factor that was used during 
distillation.

Of course you can batch convert by using macros in all Adobe applications.

2.
At present I can't recommend any other graphics file format than PDF.
Stick with (de facto) standards and you need to change your workflow 
less often.

(BTW, Pierre was asking for ways of still using PICT vector graphics 
that are out-putted by his FB-app and I see no sense in going from 
PICt to some other format than PDF, if he updates his app sometime in 
the future.)

Best
-- 

                   Herbie

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