I am familiarising myself with PDFDocument and so far have managed to create a decent looking mock exam paper based on random data pulled from an sqlitedatabase
I use a pagecounter as integer to keep track of what page I’m on and increment it whenever I use the Graphics.NextPage method. At the bottom of each page I draw the page number “page x”.
Ideally, I would like it to say “page x of y”.
My initial thought was, after I’d finishing creating all pages, to then go back and number each page, now that I know the total. However, I was a bit surprised that there doesn’t seem to be a way to go back to a previous page. For my own education, why is that?
So to achieve what I want, would the best way be to calculate how many pages it will take to fit all the text at the start, before drawing anything? I know that will work, but it just seems a bit inelegant to loop through all the data twice, doing basically the same calculations and operations
What they want to do “simply”, understandably, there is currently no option in PDFDocument. But if you look at this feedback case <https://xojo.com/issue/65247>, which is marked as “Implemented”, you should get a feeling that the “soon” should be possible.
The reason I requested it (besides needing it! ) is that in the Einhugur PDF plugin that I use, PDFpage is a class. There I just subclassed Einhugur’s PDFDocument class and overrided the AddPage Method to store the page reference in an array in it, so i could do things like that.
I was very surprised when Xojo initially released the PDF functionally that it was not more OOP and I could not do that!
I was originally thinking using Xojo PDF support when it came out, but the lack of that capability and some others missing features the Einhugur plugin has that I needed, along with some rough edges handling graphics, has made me take a wait and see attitude about switching over to using the Xojo PDF support.