On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 11:52 AM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
<znmeb / cesmail.net> wrote:


> 2. New features for Prawn aka PDF::Document? The PDF format includes the
> ability to incorporate multimedia files "seamlessly" into a document.
> One extremely impressive example of this is a format called "U3D". This
> allows you to incorporate a 3D object in a PDF with very little space
> cost, and you can rotate the object, change the lighting on it, etc.
> There's a stunning example of the capabilities of this at
>
> http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/Laurana.pdf

This wouldn't load in OS X Preview.  Interesting to see this stuff
used, I saw brief mentions of this in the PDF specs, but I was sort of
expecting it was unused and unsupported across many viewers.   The
former I've apparently been proven wrong on, the latter, I think might
be right.  What viewers support this?

> And the code to make it is at
>
> http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/Laurana_tex.zip
>
> I'm sure the tools in PDF::Document can easily get a U3D into a PDF, or
> if not, could be extended to do so easily. But what I'd really like is a
> set of Ruby libraries / classes for making the U3Ds from data! Right
> now, it looks like the main open source package for making U3Ds is
> Meshlab, which is at
>
> http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/
>
> See also
>
> http://vcg.sourceforge.net/

You'd need to write an extension, but it might not be too hard.  I
haven't researched it at all, honestly.  You might look at the PDF
spec[0].  It'd be neat to see an extension that did this, and I'd
expose the necessary bits to make sure it was possible to do
externally, but I'm sure this wouldn't be part of core Prawn, and I
hesitate to say whether it'd be part of the 'official' project.   It
seems like a better home for it might be SciRuby or something like
that.   We'd of course help promote the use of the tool and help with
the Prawn specific details, but beyond that, this seems a bit
specialized for what we're trying to keep a small and simple library.
Please do look into this though, and feel free to discuss it on the
Prawn list in hopes of finding other interested parties.

-greg


[0] http://www.adobe.com/devnet/pdf/pdf_reference.html

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