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

One requirement I’d like to add to this excellent tender template discussion is about handling credentials with lots of optional data and with repeating structures - so require dynamic template 

Take a trade invoice as a VC for example. Might include payment details and might not - do you tender payment properties with no data or just leave out that block ?

Still on the invoice, it might have one line item or a hundred line items so rendering would need to show as many line items as there are in the instance. 

We are coping with these needs well enough with html rendering.  Not sure whether an svg or pdf template can be dynamic like that ?

Steven Capell
Mob: 0410 437854

> On 18 Apr 2025, at 4:37 am, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com> wrote:
> 
> 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
> 
> --
> Manu Sporny - https://www.linkedin.com/in/manusporny/
> Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
> https://www.digitalbazaar.com/
>

Received on Friday, 18 April 2025 01:12:39 UTC