Tumble feedback

[Paul Williams]

Dear Eric,

I've now had a chance to have a good session with Tumble, so I thought 
I'd let you know the results.

I've been putting off scanning the "ADM-3 Maintenance Manual" for ages 
because it has four full-page black and white photographs and five 
colour illustrations amongst its 140-odd pages. I knew that my usual 
route of sending 600dpi TIFF G4 scans through c42pdf wasn't going to 
work, so it has been on the sidelines until I had the opportunity to try 
Tumble.

Scanning the pages and collating the results with tumble went very 
smoothly as it quite happily accepted the mix of resolutions and page 
sizes I gave it: 600dpi 1-bit text, 150dpi JPEG photographs and colour 
illustrations and one fold-out page.

So, I thought I'd experiment with the control file syntax. It took a bit 
of trial and error, but I managed to get the same result by that method, 
so I took the opportunity to add a title and keywords. Then I tried 
adding a Table of Contents with the bookmarks, and it is fantastic! The 
bookmarks really made it look like a professional job.

I have two questions about the bookmarks.

Question 1. It wasn't obvious how to add a bookmark without having some 
other effect on the document, such as outputting the next page. I had a 
situation where I wanted to represent this fragment of TOC:

    2.2 two point two ................ 9
      2.2.1 two point two point one .. 9
    2.3 two point three .............. 9

and I though at first I could do this:

bookmark "two point two" {
   bookmark "two point two point one" { page 9; };
};
bookmark "two point three" { page 9; };

but that's no good because I've someone incremented the pointer past 
page 9 by referring to it the first time.

I eventually found that I could satisfy the parser by putting in a 
"label ;", like this:

bookmark "two point two" {
   bookmark "two point two point one" { label ; };
};
bookmark "two point three" { page 9; };

and that works (and the label doesn't appear to do anything), but I 
thought it would be neater if I could just remove the "{ label ; }" 
section altogether.

Question 2. I know that a bookmark is just a point in the document, but 
sometimes a section goes on for several pages. It seems to me that there 
are two ways of describing this in the control file.

With the first way, the section appears to "own" all the intermediate pages:

bookmark "section 2" { pages 1 .. 10; };
bookmark "section 3" { page 11; };

The other way is:

bookmark "section 2" { page 1; };
pages 2 .. 10;
bookmark "section 3" { page 11; };

Is there any difference in the way that these two are represented in the 
PDF? I don't want Acrobat to get confused when I'm going backwards or 
forwards through the pages. (I could experiment more, but I only get 
limited opportunities to use a Windows box and Acrobat -- and xpdf on my 
machine doesn't show me the ToC anyway!)

----
Last point (honest!) -- you mentioned compositing images on a page as a 
possible improvement to tumble. I would be very interested in this, 
because I'd rather scan a page twice to composite a photo in page than 
insert the entire page in TIFF or JPEG. Because JPEGs survive expansion 
well, I'd like to carry on scanning text at 600dpi (particularly as 
these manuals often have fiddly diagrams on them) and scanning photos at 
150dpi, which seems a reasonable compromise between file size and 
fidelity when printed out.

I'm quite prepared to do the positioning of the JPEG myself, if the page 
dimensions can be taken from the first image that forms it (ie. the 
TIFF). I would probably erase the TIFF version of the photo to give 
myself some leeway, and then I'd would just composite with something like:

page { image "main.tiff"; image "pic1.jpeg" { at 3in, 5.5in }; };

I haven't been through the parser to see whether the skeleton of this is 
already there, but I hope the requirement is clear enough.

Thanks for a great program!

BTW, I couldn't quite finish the ToC for the ADM-3 manual tonight, but 
I'll finish it on Friday afternoon and then let you know where it is, 
along with the control file, so you can see if I've misinterpreted anything.

Regards,
Paul