Re^2: Generating multi page PDF with bitmap images, vector graphics and text.

Thanks for your warning about generating a PDF with millions of elements, I did not know about that issue. For my problem, I will have around 160_000 elements in the total document, so not a million, but a fairly substantial number, which could probably be reduced by merging some images that are meant to appear adjacent to each other into a single image.

There is not an absolute requirement for PDF, the requirement is to be able to print the final document onto paper, with precise control over the placement of elements. The document will be printed double sided, and elements on opposite sides of the sheet need to line up to within a millimetre or so. I know that PDF will meet that requirement, but I don't know of any other format that will. Is there a multi page extension to SVG?

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Re^3: Generating multi page PDF with bitmap images, vector graphics and text.
by roboticus (Chancellor) on Nov 22, 2010 at 11:55 UTC

chrestomanci:

If you want to keep the PDF small, you may want to scale and/or render all images into a common format at the size you want in the final document. Otherwise, some PDF tools may just put in the full-size graphic and scale it down internally. (That's fine, too, if you want them to be able to pull out the full-size graphic from the PDF file. But if you're captioning the graphics with an URL to give them access to them, then you probably don't want to distribute all of them in your PDF, too.)

...roboticus

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Re^3: Generating multi page PDF with bitmap images, vector graphics and text.
by tod222 (Pilgrim) on Nov 23, 2010 at 02:34 UTC

...the requirement is to be able to print the final document onto paper, with precise control over the placement of elements. The document will be printed double sided, and elements on opposite sides of the sheet need to line up to within a millimetre or so. I know that PDF will meet that requirement, but I don't know of any other format that will

Yes, that strict print requirement precludes using HTML.

You looked into Cairo and SVG as intermediate formats but not any of the venerable print document formats? I guess it's an indication of how much the web has eclipsed print that its document formats are being lost to obscurity:

Format Modules

PostScript CPAN (287 found)

TeX CPAN (156 found)

ODF (Open Document Format) CPAN (28 found)

DVI (Device independent) CPAN (14 found)

PostScript and TeX go way back, while ODF is new.

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