Re: [Swftools-common] Conversion issues

[Matthias Kramm]

On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 01:47:23PM +0000, Craig Martin <address@hidden> wrote:
> I am working with the PDF2SWF tool and have found a few issues that I would 
> love to get resolved if anyone knows how:
> 
> 1)    Regarding type of files that had issues, we found errors with
> files having transparency groups and we had to use the additional
> parameter "-s poly2bitmap" to generate the SWF. The types of errors
> that were encountered were:
> 
> a.    ?badly balanced softmasks/transparency groups?

This is a known problem, and will be fixed soon.

> b.    "multiply blended transparency groups not yet supported"

This is not an error, just a warning. In most cases, your file will
look fine.

> c.     This file is too complex to render- SWF only supports 65536 shapes at 
> once (this was already taken care previously)

These two problems are related to underlying limitations of the SWF file
format. You can only have up to 65536 active objects in a given SWF file.

Workarounds include generating a seperate SWF file for every page.

> 2)    For both these errors, we did a re-run with the additional
> parameter "-s poly2bitmap" (through the supported fall back mechanism
> in the code). However, using this parameter has the following
> disadvantages:
> 
> a.    This consumes lot of memory .
> b.    Takes a lot of time to process.
> c.     Consumes lot of CPU ? sometimes 100%.

poly2bitmap is a more expensive operation, as it has to solve the 
bitmap+text layering problem. Some additional CPU and memory consumption
is to be expected.

> d.    There is no guarantee that the SWF will get generated with this
> parameter. For some files the SWF got generated but for some it did
> not generate the SWF.

If poly2bitmap fails as well, try "-s bitmap".

> 3)    We also found that SWFs cannot be generated if a PDF is password 
> protected.

Strictly speaking, only if it's password protected and has the "no copy"
bit set, which means that the creator of the PDF file doesn't allow the
extraction of content from this file (which is essentially what pdf2swf
does).
If you know the password for the file, you may want to preprocess it
using pdftk:
    pdftk file.pdf owner_pdf *password* output file.pdf

Matthias