There are a ton of things to consider
and then there’s the whole issue of “well you generated this surely you can read it back in” …
generating a pdf just using the default fonts that PDF’s support is pretty easy but supporting most / all of the spec and adding in reading is an enormous undertaking
[quote=37921:@Norman Palardy]There are a ton of things to consider
and then there’s the whole issue of “well you generated this surely you can read it back in” …
generating a pdf just using the default fonts that PDF’s support is pretty easy but supporting most / all of the spec and adding in reading is an enormous undertaking[/quote]
Ya, ya, ya… I don’t want know how the sausage is made, I just want to eat it… 
Will this all be ready for 2013R4?
All kidding aside I think it needs to thought out. The last thing we want is a solution that is quirky or unusable. Honestly the report writer is a little disappointing.
Is not feasible to license an existing product, or at least use that for a basis for a head start?
[quote=37926:@Joseph Evert]
Is not feasible to license an existing product, or at least use that for a basis for a head start?[/quote]
The times we’ve asked any library creators for a license suitable for OUR use & deployment model its been … ridiculously expensive would be a suitable way to describe the pricing 
Yes… that is some of what I had in mind
But from the way Norm is posting I have to wonder of this scheduled feature request will ever see the light of day…
I can relate. We found a library for a client project that looked good. When we asked for a quote they asked us what our corporate income was (really!). They didn’t care about how many we’d sell or anything like that. They only cared about how much they could extract from us.
So we ended up using a Mac library and a Windows library for doing it. It sucked but it worked.
[quote=37935:@Bob Keeney]I can relate. We found a library for a client project that looked good. When we asked for a quote they asked us what our corporate income was (really!). They didn’t care about how many we’d sell or anything like that. They only cared about how much they could extract from us.
So we ended up using a Mac library and a Windows library for doing it. It sucked but it worked.[/quote]
what library are you referring to??
[quote=37933:@Karen Atkocius]Yes… that is some of what I had in mind
But from the way Norm is posting I have to wonder of this scheduled feature request will ever see the light of day… [/quote]
Oh it will it just might not be a “do everything under the sun” kind of library - as that kind of library usually has hefty licensing attached to it (runtime or otherwise)
You can peek at a few like PDFLib, DynaPDF, Adobe & check out their licenses (and recall we need to not just ship it to you for your use but for use in YOUR programs - basically unlimited redistribution licenses)
On OS X we could just use the built in PDF Kit but that won’t work on Windows & Linux
There are a few light weight PDF libraries, like libHaru, which only do a subset of what PDF can do (and that could easily be done in Xojo code.
[quote=37945:@Norman Palardy]
There are a few light weight PDF libraries, like libHaru, which only do a subset of what PDF can do (and that could easily be done in Xojo code.[/quote]
I took a look at libHaru docs … What I did not see is explicit support for tables… I hope the Xojo implementations will regardless of what library of what if any library you use.
Asher’s open source classes I use ( which are pure Xojo code) have PDTable and PDFCell classes that are very convenient for creating tables.
Yeah libHaru is way on the “simple” side of things and supports a small subset of whats possible with PDF’s.
Ashers was more comprehensive in many ways.
As I said when people say “PDF support” they have something in mind but to have read / write / edit / form filling support is a gigantic library
I get that now and then from people, and Im using DynaPDF.
There is a huge difference between the flexibility of Preview on the Mac, Adobe (the ‘real thing’) on the PC, and something like Foxit on the PC.
Of the readers available, Adobe is the one that usually has trouble!
Well, as some people are interested in PDF Library, I want to make special offer for you.
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Karen wrote:
You are missing the point.
Thats right.
Of course, I can manually add many pdf atoms (files) together using Preview (OS X only) Adobe Acrobat Pro (whatever its name is now) or But this is not what is asked.
Thank you for let me understand what is asked (I was really far away from the conversation).
@Christian: does the starter kit support page numbers? I don’t remember. Does the current version support html with the most ugly markup you can imagine? I also remember having problem with different encodings in one paragraph. Is this fixed?
Considering even the best browsers have problems with ugly markup, I’d say it’s unfair to ask a PDF rendering program to do much better (as I assume it uses said engines behind the scenes).
It does. Because after you almost finished your PDF, you can edit each page to add the page number you want.
DynaPDF does not render HTML. You can do that with our Cocoa WebKit extensions.
But DynaPDF has a WriteFText function which supports different style changes.
I’m not aware of such a bug. Please try current version and if you have an issue, please send me an email with a sample project.