Mac, PDFKit, PDF/X

Question

I'm in need of generating and viewing PDF/X-1a. After spending quite some time I came to the conclusion that the only way (hopefully someone will prove me wrong) to achieve this is to use Cocoa.

More context: I need to generate PDF/X-1a, that is, all the fonts embeded, spot colors, overprint, ... preferably from Python. But the only libraries which support such things are iText and perhaps and Apache FOP. The first one could be used with Jython, which is ok but not optimal.

But then, I simply could not find any viable viewer. Poppler, xpdf, Sumatra, mupdf, ghostscirpt - all of them - just cannot handle large CMYK pdfs, lots of text, ...

I really would like to use open sourced libraries but unfortuntatelly the only option I see right now is to buy Mac as I saw one could print (Save-as) to built-in PDF printer under PDF/X conformance and I expect Preview to be comparable, if not better, to Acrobat. But I'm not sure if is it even possible to programmatically access the MacOS libraries responsible for generating PDF? I'm asking because I heard not everything from MacOS is available via public API... (And what Python goes, I thought I could use PyObjC..?)

Any others ideas are of course very welcomed!

Answer 1

I would recommend Xpdf for rendering PDF to raster. It doesn't explicitly support PDF/X, in fact it doesn't use embedded ICC profiles at all. However, you could wrap it in your own code to retrieve the PDF/X OutputIntent profiles and write a custom OutputDev class to call littlecms (or similar library) to apply ICC color conversions and convert to RGB for display.

I was one of the authors of PDF/X and implemented the first preflight application for PDF/X-1a. Let me know if you specific help.

Dwight Kelly Apago, Inc. www.apagoinc.com