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I like the chunking approach.  It is efficient, reliable, and has low overhead for reasonably sized chunks.  Also fits well in a typical implementation that writes a chunk of data at a time.         -Carl <table width=100%> <tr valign=top> <td> <td>"Zehler, Peter" <PZehler@crt.xerox.com> Sent by: owner-ifx@pwg.org 03/05/2003 05:00 AM <td>                To:        "'Rick Seeler'" <rseeler@adobe.com>, ifx@pwg.org         cc:                 Subject:        RE: IFX> PDF/is Issue. </table> Rick, Why not just increase the size of the length field signature?  Could this be done by the addition of data or comments in the length object or by adding another object?  I don't know pdf very well.  I don't think we need 0% probability of confusion just a statistically insignificant chance. Pete   Peter Zehler XEROX Xerox Architecture Center Email: PZehler@crt.xerox.com Voice:    (585) 265-8755 FAX:      (585) 265-8871 US Mail: Peter Zehler         Xerox Corp.        800 Phillips Rd.        M/S 128-30E        Webster NY, 14580-9701 -----Original Message----- From: Rick Seeler [mailto:rseeler@adobe.com] Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2003 1:29 PM To: ifx@pwg.org Subject: IFX> PDF/is Issue. During prototyping of PDF/is the following problem arose:   How does the Consumer know when the end of a data stream (See section 3.2.7 of [pdf]) is reached?  Normally, in a PDF, the Consumer would consult the stream length field.  The problem here is where to put the length field.  If the length were placed before the stream, the Consumer would know how long the stream is. This requires the Producer to know the stream's length before writing it to the Consumer.  If, instead, the length were written at the end of the stream, this would solve the Producer's problem but the Consumer would not know how to find the length since they can't identify, 100% of the time, where the stream ends and where the length object is.   An example will illustrate: First, the normal case...   stream sdljfiwefnwfubrevurewliysnhr;hgawebfz;h;uwre (lots of binary data here).... 84trhdvfyu7wgf4.nbdrgur4uaru4gb endstream 12 0 obj 3456    <- the length of the previous stream. endobj   But, what if the data looked like this...   stream sdljfiwefnwfubrevurewliysnhr;hgawebfz;h;uwre (lots of binary data here).... endstream            <- the binary data could have a string of bytes that looked like this. 84trhdvfyu7wgf4.nbdrgur4uaru4gb endstream 12 0 obj 4567    <- the length of the previous stream. endobj   Of course, you could look to bytes after the appearance of the word 'endstream' to see if this is really the end of the stream; but you can always come up with a stream that could match your parsing algorithm's expectations (although with decreasing percentage of occurrence).   Possible solutions: 1) Write all data using ASCII85 encoding (See Section 3.3.2 of [pdf]).  This will increase stream lengths by 25%.  ASCII85 has a stream delimiter which would solve this problem -- the end of the stream can be known for certain and the length field can be placed after the stream. 2) Require the Producer to write the stream length before any stream (the streams would stay binary).  The Producer can use banding to break up large images into small enough chunks so the Producer can cache the stream before sending. 3) Offer a combination of 1 & 2.  The Producer would cache streams if possible, but may use ASCII85, if necessary. 4) Producer must make certain all streams must not contain a series of bytes "\0D\0Aendstream" in the stream data.  This is how the spec is defined currently -- but this may be too onerous for the Producer.   Any other ideas?  I'm personally leaning toward solution #3.   -Rick