David, Group, Essentially we have 2 issues here - Printing and client side PDF generation. 1. As far as sufficient printing API needed for Internet applications goes, I believe we need at least the APIs we implemented for IE 7 years ago - http://www.htmlprinting.com. We are willing to contribute the code to the Adobe player's codebase. At minimum we would need page size control and ability to print asynchronously. I would gladly discuss the features needed in depth, but as of now due to the limited printing capabilities of Flash Player most of our "business quality" printing had to be diverted to client side PDF generation.
2. Client-side PDF generation with XML is possible now as long as it is going to be viewed in Adobe 8 or better. Details of the approach were published in Farata blog (flexblog.faratasystems.com) a while ago. In short, to achieve that we had to supplement our controls library with special APIs that render content of each control as XML - sometimes producing text (thus enabling text search within the document), sometimes making images of fragments ( making document look good). Hopefully MARS will fill the gap by providing better set of controls/styling over current XDP set. In either case in order for Flex framework to be usable for masses Adobe should add: a. Generic interface for XML PDF representation for each UIComponent and Container b. Implementation in the base classes c. Printing templates that utilize that interface. Sincerely, Anatole Tartakovsky Farata Systems On Wed, Feb 13, 2008 at 12:24 PM, David Mendels <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, > > As someone pointed out, MARS is in a early state. > > I think it would really help if folks really are precise about what > problem they want to solve rather than how they want to solve it. If the > problem to solve is client-side PDF generation, there are multiple > approaches we might take to that (and we have some stuff being worked on). > That might also solve the printing requests people have, but we might also > solve some (all?) of those also through other approaches with the PrintJob > API for example. > > MARS support is interesting, but since MARS is so early, it might not be a > good short or medium term route to solving either client side PDF creation > or improved printing. So, my request to this group is: If you vote for MARS > support, be precise about why and what your use case is. If what you really > want is client side PDF creation and/or specific improvements to PrintJob, > sumbit and vote for those directly, don't use the MARS ER as a proxy. Make > sense? > > -David > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: flexcoders@yahoogroups.com <flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com> > > [mailto:flexcoders@yahoogroups.com <flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com>] On > Behalf Of João Fernandes > > Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2008 9:04 AM > > To: flexcoders@yahoogroups.com <flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com> > > Subject: Re: [flexcoders] Re: Flex Feedback for the Future > > > > Mars is a XML representation of a PDF. > > Having a "MarsLoader" component and an AS3 API to produce > > those kind of documents, we would be able not only to > > generate powerful reports but also able to view them within > > our Flex applications. > > > > By voting to this ER , if it doesn't get implemented at least > > we will know why since it seems that they are committed to > > give an explanation ( > > http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mchotin/archives/2008/02/flex_4_ > sdk_feat.cfm ) > > -- > > > > João Fernandes > > > > http://www.onflexwithcf.org > > http://www.riapt.org > > > > > > > > -- > > Flexcoders Mailing List > > FAQ: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/files/flexcodersFAQ.txt > > Search Archives: > > http://www.mail-archive.com/flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com > > Yahoo! Groups Links > > > > > > > > > >
