PDF Creator - User's guide

[AndrewMozley]

Vilhelm has kindly provided a working example of code which uses PDFCreator.

I would like to obtain a user's guide to PDFCreator. Does anyone have a User's Guide, with a table of contents, an index and perhaps a worked example which can explain how PDFCreator can be used from Visual Foxpro?

I realise that there is the On-Line help which Robin Werner has kindly pointed me to, but unless one already knows how to use PDFCreator, it is difficult to know where to begin! I find that I can click on the on-line help and get to a particular subject - for example The PrintJob - void SetProfileByGuid(string profileGuid), but I do not know whether I need to use this function; the same applies to the other functions.

I need also to understand how to incorporate these functions into a VFP program.

It would be very nice to have a description of the sequence of commands which are required to generate a pdf file. The reason that I am able to do this at present is that Vilhlem supplied a sequence of instructions which he found had worked! I would like to understand this by working through a user's guide to PDFCreator, if that is available.

I have asked the people at PDFCreator; they have done their best, but do not work with VFP, (and very politely mention that VFP is not supported by the manufacturer), so they cannot put effort into producing VFP documentation.

 

[Olaf Doschke]

Why do you think you need further code at all?

Do you have any goals you can't achieve by setting the printer and printing whatever you want as PDF? Eg do you want to create a PDF with an embedded form? I don't know if PDFCreator is the right tool for that, but the general question is, what else do you want to do besides generating PDFs from VFP reports?

Bye, Olaf.

 

[Dan Freeman]

I have asked the people at PDFCreator; they have done their best, but do not work with VFP, (and very politely mention that VFP is not supported by the manufacturer), so they cannot put effort into producing VFP documentation.

Even if VFP were supported by the manufacturer, PDFCreator certainly isn't obligated to document VFP and that's what you're asking.

 

[AndrewMozley]

Thank you for your replies; Certainly there is no obligation of PDFCreator to document a VFP interface; As mentioned, I am asking on this site if any of our helpful correspondents has notes which could act as a guide to the use of PDFCreator from VFP. It would be most helpful to receive a reply from someone who has used PDFCreator .

Thanks.

 

[Tore Bleken]

Just like Olaf, I also would like to know why you use PDFCreator in the first place. Personally I use FoxyPreviewer, which is completely free, to create all my PDFs.

https://foxypreviewer.codeplex.com

 

[Olaf Doschke]

Again the question: What other features do you need at all?

It's cumbersome to write docs, you can decide what methods of the classes you'd like to use from the PDFCreator Docs, knowing how to use them in VFP won't help deciding that.
As it's OLE classes, the usage in VFP also doesn't differ. If you have an object o , you call methods via o.method(param1,param2) etc.

Bye, Olaf.

 

[AndrewMozley]

To tbleken

Thanks for your note; you did indeed mention FoxyPreviewer when I first enquired about producing pdf files. At the time I went with pdfCreator (which also has a free version), partly because some guidance was available.

However at your suggestion yesterday I have downloaded FoxyPreviewer. It works fine, and will generate pdf output to a named file. One thing that I have noticed is that it is fairly slow: producing a report from a single table of 400 records takes about 60 seconds on my machine.

I see that there has been correspondence on other forums about the speed of production of .pdf files. This is is not a major problem, but I wonder if there are any settings in FoxyPreviewer which can speed this up?

Andrew

 

[Tore Bleken]

Have you checked the documentation at

https://foxypreviewer.codeplex.com/documentation?

Also note that there is an ISSUES tab on that website where you can post such questions.

 

[Olaf Doschke]

Indeed the place to discuss foxypreviewer issues is at the VFPX foxypreviewer homepage.

It uses a DLL and the reportlistener. The reportlistener render method calls this DLLs to create single textual or graphical PDF elements. This causes each tidbit of your report to be rendered into the final PDF file step by step with all render events caused by a report. A PDF printer driver does the conversion different, the VFP report engine here directs the output to the driver in he same way as to any printer driver, eg page by page. That is more effective in regard of timings, number of calls, but actually if any aspect of the PDF result is not as you want, eg text coming out as graphic, there's nothing you can do about it if using a PDF printer driver like PDFCreator on the one side, but if you're not afraid of deep diving into foxypreviewer you can alter the render event code as you like.

There's one downside of foxypreviewer: libhpdf, the PDF dll component used, is an open source project currently stalling, looking for a new maintainer, see [URL unfurl="true"]http://libharu.org/[/url].
So the basis of foxypreviewer PDF capabilities is a library not currently in progress, eg to support future PDF versions. Any issues that DLL might have will not be fixed prompt.

You have one simple thing to accelerate: Newer hardware. Actually foxypreviewer is fast enough on even my 4 year old system, and I bought it with focus on low power consumption rather than with focus on performance, just a 1.6GHz dual core.

Bye, Olaf.

 

[vgulielmus]

Vilhlem supplied a sequence of instructions which he found had worked

Thank you for the kind words.
Actually my contribution is minor, because the code comes from Mike Gagnon.
I already provided the two links (from foxite and atoutfox)

I don't use currently FoxyPreviewer, but I tried it, and made me an excellent impression.


Respectfully,
Vilhelm-Ion Praisach
Resita, Romania