Re: Mysterious gzipped images

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> Sure, renaming from `decompress-gzipped-region' to something more
> prefixey would make sense.  Do you prefer zlib (which is what the zlib
> people call it), or libz (which is what all other people call their
> libraries)?

If (random 2) return 1, then "libz-" is the clear winner, but if it
returns 0 then "zlib-" is way better.

>> Stefan "Hmm... looks like this doesn't include a function to
>> decompress PDF data yet :-("
> Does PDF need decompression?

I have Elisp code that reads a PDF file and returns the number of pages
it has (I use it in doc-view to determine the last page without having
to render the whole file), but it doesn't work in recent PDFs because
the index is now compressed using some kind of gzip but without the
usual file header, kind of like the gzip compression used in ssh.

This PDF-reading code is only in my local changes because without
support for current PDFs it's pretty useless.  But its absence in trunk
also makes it harder (read: not installed yet) to provide good support
for lazy-rendering (i.e. only render those pages you look at), which is
a feature I use a lot and that some users have requested.

Hence, it'd be nice if zlib could provide the function I need to
decompress the index at the end of PDF files.


        Stefan