Dear Gerard,
your wrote
The current "external.png" implementation is horribly broken in languages that are right to left like Farsi, Hebrew, Arabic. So let's create a "pdf icon" only when the implementation of the external.png is fixed. Let's not add more garbage in a manner that we know is broken.
however, it doesn't matter, where that icon actually is (left or right -- this can be programmable, dependent on the direction of writing).
My point is, do we want this or not ?
Tom