Using PDFTron PDF to SVG for content on iPhone/iPad and other mobile devices.

[Support]

Q: We are looking to display pages similar to the ones I sent you as
PDFs on a number of different smartphone platforms (iPhone,
Blackberry, and Android). We are currently using .png images, but run
into issues as screen resolutions become much larger (as with iPhone 4
recently). Rather than continually increasing the image resolution,
we are exploring vectorized ways of solving this problem - and hence
the examination of .svg.

A couple of follow-up questions. Do you know if there would be any
benefit in exploring svg Tiny as a format. Presumably we could
contract you to modify your PDF2SVG system (http://www.pdftron.com/
pdf2svg/index.html) to output in this format? But can it preserve the
details that we require (as per the .PDFs).
What about other formats - is there anything you could suggest that
may work better for us?

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A: We could definitely tweak PDF2SVG to produce SVG tiny. Please note
that because SVG Tiny has some limitations compared to the full
specification. This means that some effects such as shadings and soft
masks may need to be rasterized. At the same time text and paths
should remain device independent. So unlike PDF2SVG the modified
converter would not try to map all features 1-1 from PDF to SVG, but
it would preserve original document accuracy and device independence
for text and most paths (similar to SilverDox - see below).

> What about other formats - is there anything you could suggest that
> may work better for us?

We have recently released a product called SilverDox (http://
www.pdftron.com/silverdox/) which is using Silverlight XPS as the
online format. You can access some sample files on the following page:
http://www.pdftron.com/silverdox/samplecode.html. Unfortunately due to
Apple's licensing policies Silverlight (and Flash) are currently not
available on their mobile devices.