Re: [MINUTES] CCG Incubation and Promotion 2025-04-16

Next Wed works!

No problems with Mustache – great choice, IMO.

As far as substitutions – depends on the criteria for substitutions.  I can talk through options next week.   IMO, conversion from HTML (or any other markup language) should only be necessary in rare cases,  The vast majority of options can be done natively on existing PDF “templates”.

Leonard

From: Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>
Date: Thursday, April 17, 2025 at 2:36 PM
To: public-credentials@w3.org <public-credentials@w3.org>
Subject: Re: [MINUTES] CCG Incubation and Promotion 2025-04-16
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On Wed, Apr 16, 2025 at 8:45 PM Leonard Rosenthol <lrosenth@adobe.com> wrote:
> There seems to be some misinformation, or at least some misunderstandings, here around PDF and how it can be used as part of the `render` piece for a VC.  If I read this correctly, someone is implying that you can’t do variable substitution with PDF – and that is certainly not true. You need properly prepared PDFs and good quality PDF libraries – just as do with any other format(s) you wish to work with – but it should all be doable.

Hmm, I don't think anyone said that you can't do variable substitution
with PDF. In fact, we're counting on it (and some of us have
implemented it, as Mike Prorock said, with no significant issues).

What there was some trepidation around, was the use of Mustache with
PDF (is there some esoteric PDF processing rule that uses {{VARIABLE}}
syntax that will break the PDF file if we were to do something like
that? Or, is there a more accepted variable substitution language that
is a best practice for PDF (other than Mustache)? Should we nudge
people to produce PDFs from HTML files? If so, do we run the process
in a sandbox to prevent "phone home" or correlation attacks? Are there
i18n concerns when doing variable substitution inside a PDF? These are
the sorts of questions that the group was feeling some trepidation
over, as none of us are PDF experts... but that said, you are a PDF
expert :), which leads me to:

> Happy to discuss here in email or I can try to attend a future meeting with this as the topic.  (or both)

Can you join us on our next call (Next Wednesday at 11am ET)? We'd
like to discuss the questions above with you and see if you can see
any issues with the latest proposed approach. Ideally, we can decide
if Mustache will work for PDF variable name substitution, or if we
want to use something that is more native to PDF. Feel free to take a
shot at the responses on the mailing list first, it'll help pre-warm
the conversation for next week (if you can make it).

-- manu

--
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