Hi all, I've been working with the material Neil Dennis presented at the Summit for building PDFs directly in code. In general I'm really pleased with the results I'm getting. Neil's demo database provides the basic tools you need to be able to build a PDF document. I used them as a starting point for a couple of reports I need to be able to produce directly into PDFs. It is a little counter-intuitive in many ways but after dinking with it for a few hours I was able to start actually building things I could use. It turns out to be much like building reports using Print form but with fewer of the limitations. Most notably unlike Print form you can traverse the document in almost any order. So you can determine the bottom of page (by 'printing' down to it), move on to the next page or two and come back to the first page to add something - like the ending page. Pretty cool. And the documents are created as BLOBs so they can be stored, attached to emails as is or written to disk.
This is good for me because it resolves various issues I had regarding producing these documents using the standard printer-translation approach. The "but" comes in the form of some character encoding issues. This is not an area of strength for me so this may be pitifully simple but some characters don't encode correctly in the PDF text even though 4D is happy to deal with them in text fields. Things like 'smart quotes' and em dashes are the first things to popup. The first thing I did was take a look at what the characters are by using Character code. Here are some examples of what I found: ¿ : 0x00BF questiondown " : 0x0022 quotedbl „ : 0x201E quotedblbase “ : 0x201C quotedblleft ” : 0x201D quotedblright ‘ : 0x2018 quoteleft ’ : 0x2019 quoteright ‚ : 0x201A quotesinglbase ' : 0x0027 quotesingle The numbers are the UTF-16 char codes returned by Character code (in hex). OK. What can I do with that? The easy kludge is to simply replace them with ASCII equivalents. (ie. stop the bleeding.) But that's an unsatisfying solution. Plus it seems kinda sloppy since I copied those code samples from the PDF Reference <http://www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/devnet/acrobat/pdfs/pdf_reference_1-7.pdf> PDF (pp 999) and these very characters are referenced on pp 1005. I'm wondering if something happens in the blob manipulation during construction. The PDF is built in blobs and there are some conversions of blob to text and text to blob along the way. Or this may be an issue of not having complete font information available. Are there any PDF facil readers who can offer some insight here? Thanks -- Kirk Brooks San Francisco, CA ======================= ********************************************************************** 4D Internet Users Group (4D iNUG) FAQ: http://lists.4d.com/faqnug.html Archive: http://lists.4d.com/archives.html Options: http://lists.4d.com/mailman/options/4d_tech Unsub: mailto:[email protected] **********************************************************************
