thumbpdf (was: Re: thumbnails?)

[Heiko Oberdiek <oberdiek@ruf.uni-freiburg.de>]

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/