qpdf-8.3.0

[Bruce Dubbs]

New minor version.

[Bruce Dubbs]

• Add sample completion files in completions. These can be used by packagers to install on the system wherever bash and zsh keep their vendor-supplied completions.

• Add configure flag --enable-check-autofiles, which is on by default. Packagers whose packaging systems automatically refresh autoconf or libtool files should pass --disable-check-autofiles to ./configure to suppress warnings about automatically generated

• Remove the restriction in most cases that the source QPDF used in a copyForeignObject call has to stick around until the destination QPDF is written. The exceptional case is when the source stream gets is data using a QPDFObjectHandle::StreamDataProvider. For a more in-depth discussion, see comments around copyForeignObject in QPDF.hh.

• When generating appearances, if the font uses one of the standard, built-in encodings, restrict the character set to that rather than just to ASCII. This will allow most appearances to contain characters from the ISO-Latin-1 range plus a few additional characters.

• Add methods QUtil::utf8_to_win_ansi and QUtil::utf8_to_mac_roman.

• Add method QUtil::utf8_to_utf16.

• Add new option --optimize-images, which recompresses every image using DCT (JPEG) compression as long as the image is not already compressed with lossy compression and recompressing the image reduces its size. The additional options --oi-min-width, --oi-min-height, and --oi-min-area prevent recompression of images whose width, height, or pixel area (width * height) are below a specified threshold.

• Add new option --collate. When specified, the semantics of --pages change from concatenation to collation. See the manual for a more detailed discussion.

• Add new method QPDFWriter::getFinalVersion, which returns the PDF version that will ultimately be written to the final file. See comments in QPDFWriter.hh for some restrictions on its use.

• When unexpected errors are found while checking linearization data, print an error message instead of calling assert, which cause the program to crash.

• Detect and recover from dangling references. If a PDF file contained an indirect reference to a non-existent object (which is valid), when adding a new object to the file, it was possible for the new object to take the object ID of the dangling reference, thereby causing the dangling reference to point to the new object. This case is now prevented.

• Add --generate-appearances flag to the qpdf command-line tool to trigger generation of appearance streams.

• Fix behavior of form field value setting to handle the following cases:
  • Strings are always written as UTF-16
  • Check boxes and radio buttons are handled properly with synchronization of values and appearance states

• Define constants in qpdf/Constants.h for interpretation of annotation and form field flags

• Add QPDFAnnotationObjectHelper::getFlags

• Add many new methods to QPDFFormFieldObjectHelper for querying flags and field types

• Add new methods for appearance stream generation. See comments in QPDFFormFieldObjectHelper.hh for generateAppearance() for a description of limitations.
  • QPDFAcroFormDocumentHelper::generateAppearancesIfNeeded
  • QPDFFormFieldObjectHelper::generateAppearance

• Bug fix: when writing form field values, always write string values encoded as UTF-16.

• Add method QUtil::utf8_to_ascii, which returns an ASCII string for a UTF-8 string, replacing out-of-range characters with a specified substitute.

• Add method QPDFObjectHandle::getResourceNames that returns a set of strings representing all second-level keys in a dictionary (i.e. all keys of all direct dictionary members).

• Add --flatten-annotations flag to the qpdf command-line tool for annotation flattening.

• Add methods for flattening form fields and annotations:
  • QPDFPageDocumentHelper::flattenAnnotations - integrate annotation appearance streams into page contents with special handling for form fields: if appearance streams are up to date (/NeedAppearances is false in /AcroForm), the /AcroForm key of the document catalog is removed. Otherwise, a warning is issued, and form fields are ignored. Non-form-field annotations are always flattened if an appearance stream can be found.
  • QPDFAnnotationObjectHelper::getPageContentForAppearance - generate the content stream fragment to render an appearance stream in a page's content stream as a form xobject. Called by flattenAnnotations.

• Add method QPDFObjectHandle::mergeResources(), which merges resource dictionaries. See detailed description in QPDFObjectHandle.hh.

• Add QPDFObjectHandle::Matrix, similar to QPDFObjectHandle::Rectangle, as a convenience class for six-element arrays that are used as matrices.

• When specifying @arg on the command line, if the file "arg" does not exist, just treat this is a normal argument. This makes it easier to deal with files whose names start with the @ character. Fixes #265.

• Tweak completion so it works with zsh as well using bashcompinit.

• Add new options --json, --json-key, and --json-object to generate a json representation of the PDF file. This is described in more depth in the manual. You can also run qpdf --json-help to get a description of the json format.

• Allow --show-object=trailer for showing the document trailer.

• You can now use eval $(qpdf --completion-bash) to enable bash completion for qpdf. It's not perfect, but it works pretty well.

• When splitting pages using --split-pages, the outlines dictionary and some supporting metadata are copied into the split files. The result is that all bookmarks from the original file appear, and those that point to pages that are preserved work while those that point to pages that are not preserved don't do anything. This is an interim step toward proper support for bookmark preservation in split files.

• Add QPDFOutlineDocumentHelper and QPDFOutlineObjectHelper for handling outlines (bookmarks) including bidirectionally mapping between bookmarks and pages. Initially there is no support for modifying the outlines hierarchy.

• New method QPDFObjectHandle::getJSON() returns a JSON object with a partial representation of the object. See QPDFObjectHandle.hh for a detailed description.

• Add a simple JSON serializer. This is not a complete or general-purpose JSON library. It allows assembly and serialization of JSON structures with some restrictions, which are described in the header file.

• Add QPDFNameTreeObjectHelper class. This class provides useful methods for dealing with name trees, which are discussed in section 7.9.6 of the PDF spec (ISO-32000).

• Preserve page labels when merging and splitting files. Prior versions of qpdf simply preserved the page label information from the first file, which usually wouldn't make any sense in the merged file. Now any page that had a page number in any original file will have the same page number after merging or splitting.

• Add QPDFPageLabelDocumentHelper class. This is a document helper class that provides useful methods for dealing with page labels. It abstracts the fact that they are stored as number trees and deals with interpolating intermediate values that are not in the tree. It also has helper functions used by the qpdf command line tool to preserve page labels when merging and splitting files.

• Add QPDFNumberTreeObjectHelper class. This class provides useful methods for dealing with number trees, which are discussed in section 7.9.7 of the PDF spec (ISO-32000). Page label dictionaries are represented as number trees.

• New method QPDFObjectHandle::wrapInArray returns the object itself if it is an array. Otherwise, it returns an array containing the object. This is useful for dealing with PDF data that is sometimes expressed as a single element and sometimes expressed as an array, which is a somewhat common PDF idiom.

• Files generated by autogen.sh are now committed so that it is possible to build on platforms without autoconf directly from a clean checkout of the repository. The configure script detects if the files are out of date when it also determines that the tools are present to regenerate them.

• Add build in Azure Pipelines, now that it is free for open source projects.

[Bruce Dubbs]

Fixed at revision 20936.