The PDF spec allows incremental changes of a document by appending a
new XRef table and file trailer to it. These will only contain the
changed objects and will point back to the previous change, forming an
arbitrarily long chain of XRef sections and file trailers.
Every one of those XRef sections may be encoded as an XRef stream as
well, in which case the trailer is part of the stream dictionary as
usual. To make this easier, I made it so every XRef table may "own" a
trailer. This means that the main file trailer is now part of the main
XRef table.
When parsing streams we rely on a /Length item being defined in the
stream's dictionary to know how much data comprises the stream. Its
value is usually a direct value, but it can be indirect. There was
however a contradiction in the code: the condition that allowed it to
read and use the /Length value required it to be a direct value, but the
actual code using the value would have worked with indirect ones. This
meant that indirect /Length values triggered the fallback, "manual"
stream parsing code.
On the other hand, this latter code was also buggy, because it relied on
the "endstream" keyword to appear on a separate line, which isn't always
the case.
This commit both fixes the bug in the manual stream parsing scenario,
while also allowing for indirect /Length values to be used to parse
streams more directly and avoid the manual approach. The main caveat to
this second change is that for a brief period of time the Document is
not able to resolve references (i.e., before the xref table itself is
not parsed). Any parsing happening before that (e..g, the linearization
dictionary) must therefore use the manual stream parsing approach.
An XRef table usually starts with an object number of zero. While it
could technically start at any other number, this is a tell-tale sign
of a broken table.
For the "broken" documents I encountered, this always meant that some
objects must have been removed from the start of the table, without
updating the following indices. When this is the case, the document is
not able to be read normally.
However, most other PDF parsers seem to know of this quirk and fix the
XRef table automatically.
Likewise, we now check for this exact case, and if it matches up with
what we expect, we update the XRef table such that all object numbers
match the actual objects found in the file again.
Now, whenever the xref table points to a compressed object,
parse_object_with_index will look it up in the corresponding object
stream as if it were a regular object.
With this, our parser gains the bare minimum support for xref streams.
Since PDF version 1.5, a document may omit the xref table in favor of
a new kind of xref stream object. This is used to reference so-called
"compressed" objects that are part of an object stream.
With this patch we are able to parse this new kind of xref object, but
we'll have to implement object streams to use them correctly.
The Parser class is now a generic PDF object parser, of which the new
DocumentParser class derives. DocumentParser now takes over all
functions relating to linearization, pages, xref and trailer handling.
This allows the use of multiple parsers in the same document's
context, which will be needed in order to handle PDF object streams.
