[Ipe-discuss] pdf background

[Otfried Cheong]

On 25/08/14 20:44, Troels Sørensen wrote:
> Hi Ipe community,
> This workflow would be vastly improved by being able to include a pdf
> background directly in ipe. There is kind of support for doing this, by
> using pdflatex to include a pdf, but this would not be rendered by Ipe
> while working on the document, and one would have to include every page
> individually. A neat solution would be if one could "open" an existing
> pdf, which would then get an Ipe-page per page of the pdf, with the
> source pdf being rendered as a background. Is this something that could
> be fixed by a lua extension, or would this require a major change to Ipe?

To render an existing PDF document, Ipe would need to include a much 
more powerful PDF parser and interpreter.  I'm in the process of adding 
some support in this direction to support tikz inside Ipe, and in the 
long run this may make it possible to render at least some PDF documents.

In the short run, however, this is not supported.   What you could do is 
to convert the PDF document to a sequence of bitmaps (one per page) (you 
can do this, for instance, using "pdftocairo -png" from the poppler 
package), and use these bitmaps as backgrounds to draw inside Ipe.   You 
then disable or delete the bitmap background and leave it to Latex to 
overlay the original PDF with the Ipe drawing.

Much of this could be automated using Ipelets or Lua scripts.

Cheers,
  Otfried