* To: Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>
    * Subject: thumbpdf (was: Re: thumbnails?)
    * From: Heiko Oberdiek <oberdiek@ruf.uni-freiburg.de>
    * Date: Mon, 15 Feb 1999 23:07:11 +0100
    * Cc: pdftex@tug.org
    * In-Reply-To: <36B6C328.A29D99B@wxs.nl>
    * References: <3.0.6.32.19990201181024.008b5d00@pop3.uni-freiburg.de>
    * Sender: owner-pdftex@tug.org

At 10:19 02.02.99 +0100, Hans Hagen wrote:
>Heiko Oberdiek wrote:
>
>> Now, I am looking for a possibility to include only an image as object
>> in the pdf file without placing and printing it on a page.
>> Perhaps:
>> \pdfthumbnail{image.png} adds an object like \pdfimage to the
>> pdf file and
>> \pdflastthumb then reports the object number,
>> so I can use this <number> for
>> \pdfpageattr{/Thumb <number> 0 R}
>
>This is not so much different from including images for fields,
>1998-001.pdf shows a lot of these. One trick is to move the image
>maxdimen into the left margin. Works ok. (In context there is low level
>support for this kind of object tricks). 
>
>I would not vote that hard for \pdfthumbnail. Something \pdfincludeform
>is probably better: includes the form (you can put the image in there,
>but far more) but does not show up in the current stream. Or, maybe
>better: 
> \pdfformobj<number>
>
>it's an object anyhow. 

But currently I cannot find any pdfTeX primitiv commands which can
include thumbnails like \pdfimage, but without placing them on a page.
The best I found was \pdfobj/\pdflastobj. Now I have the problem
to convert the thumbnail images to pdf objects. But easy can I get 
this information by looking at a pdf file, which have included the
thumbnail images by \pdfimage.

So I have written the project 'thumbpdf' for automatic support of
thumbnails. It requires a perl script that
* generates the thumbnails itself (if the user wants this),
* calls pdfTeX to generate a pdf file with the thumbnails as images
* extracts the image objects and writes them to a TeX readable file.
The package 'thumbpdf' manages now the automatic embedding of
the thumbnails for the master TeX file.

The scripts and the package can be found on CTAN:
  CTAN:/tex-archive/macros/pdftex/thumbpdf/