According to the specification, a part of a PDF document can reside in an external file. An example for an image:
2 0 obj
<<
/Type /XObject
/Subtype /Image
/Width 117
/Height 117
/BitsPerComponent 8
/Length 0
/ColorSpace /DeviceRGB
/FFilter /DCTDecode
/F (pinguine.jpg)
>>
stream
endstream
endobj
I found that this functionality does work in Adobe Acrobat 5.0 for Windows (sample PDF with the image), also I managed to view this file in Adobe Acrobat Reader 8.1.3 for Mac OS X after I found the setting “Allow external content”. Unfortunately, it seems that non-Adobe tools ignore the external stream feature. I hope I’m wrong, therefore ask the question:
How to enable external streams in Mac OS X? (I think that all the system Mac OS X tools use the same library, therefore say “Mac OS X” instead of “Preview”.)
Or maybe there could be a programming hook to emulate external streams? My task is: store a big set of images (total ˜300Mb) outside of a small PDF (˜1Mb). At some moment, I want to filter PDF through a quartz filter and get a PDF with the images embedded. Any suggestions are welcome.
Mac OS X/Quartz does not support external streams and there is no way to “hook” into it.