Re: [9fans] Minutes of July 24 Plan 9 Foundation Board Meeting

[<tlaronde@kergis.com>]

On Fri, Aug 29, 2025 at 07:02:42AM -0700, paul lalonde wrote:
> We met yesterday, and approved the minutes for the July meeting, please see
> attached.

On some points:

Papers for IWP9 and macros:

concerning the papers: I will add during September 2025 a variable
to TeX (in fact Prote) in order to be able to process macro definition
with the escape character being the beginning of the line ('/^\./') for
roff compatibility (handling utf-8 can also be done with minimal cost,
but I need to fix my ideas about the fonts handling; so I let this
mature). So even a *roff like macro package could be treated with
TeX/Prote as layout engine;

Making money:

Since PDF is an ISO spec, a lot of entities
mandate its use, requiring to digitally sign a PDF, keeping the
PDF "vectorial" (not to scan a signed paper, wrapping the raster image
in PDF, or not even to add an image of signature on a "vectorial"
PDF). 

This is "open", right? Yes, but you will have a hard time finding an
open (not AGPL) PDF library able to do it. So a lot of companies milk
the customers requiring whether to pay for every digitally signed PDF,
or to , or to engage for a monthly subscription.

Signing a PDF is neither rendering the PDF, nor implementing the whole
PDF: the signature is appended to the file, the xref being rewritten
(one reads the PDF from the end, searching for the last '/^%EOF\n/' to
get the offset to the xref that can reach out to previous xref.

Proposing such a service with reasonable prices, adding the
possibility to choose where a text about the signature will appear
(generally, such a text appears at the most inconvenient place when
displaying the file), could work.
for 
-- 
        Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ kergis +dot+ com>
                     http://www.kergis.com/
                    http://kertex.kergis.com/
Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89  250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C

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