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I know one thing - I'm amazed me what some people think passes for "development". It's like calling painting-by-numbers fine art.
I don't think you're being unnecessarily grumpy. What might be more useful is a weekly FAQ post, as seen in most newsgroups. If nothing else this would save Leonard countless hours of typing "What Operating System? What Language? Client or Server?", which I'm sure he must have on a macro by now.
If anyone from PDFzone reads this list, could you set something like this up please? Or maybe someone more mailing-list savvy than myself would be able to do this for the public good.
This list is probably not the right place to assemble the FAQ. However, as I'm posting already I'll start the ball rolling here with some questions that I think come up a lot.
1. I want to write a program to manipulate or convert to/from PDFs in some way. How do I do it?
First, you need to answer the following questions: * How complicated are your requirements? * What operating system? * What language are you developing in? * Client or Server?
For simple tasks like converting to/from another file format, appending PDFs and so on, you might want to look at one of several tools or Acrobat plugins that are available. They include <list here>
For more complex requirements, you will need to write an application that links with a PDF library of some sort. You could write your own PDF library, but it's VERY, VERY HARD. Why bother? Here are a list of some alternatives.
* Acrobat SDK
C++/VB, Windows, client only - not licensed for server use.
http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/acrosdk/main.html * Big Faceless PDF library
Java, all OSes
http://big.faceless.org/products/pdf * iText
Java, all OSes
http://www.lowagie.com/iText * PDFlib
C with bindings for C++/Java/Perl/PHP/Python/Cobol/RPG, most OSes
http://www.pdflib.com * Glance PDF-Tools
C++, most OSes
http://www.pdf-tools.com/en/index.html2. What issues will I have running Acrobat or the Acrobat SDK on a server?
Acrobat and the SDK are not licensed for use on a server at all, so you simply won't be able to use them. Look at one of the third party APIs listed above.
3. I want to write an application that interacts with PDF.OCX
Don't. It's not a supported developer tool. It may break with the next release of Acrobat, and if it does you'll have no sympathy from us.
Cheers... Mike -- ---------------------------------------------------- Mike Bremford - CTO [EMAIL PROTECTED] Big Faceless Organization http://big.faceless.org
Mark Storer wrote:
PDFdev is a service provided by PDFzone.com | http://www.pdfzone.com _____________________________________________________________
Okay folks.
I don't like to be the list nazi, but I also don't like to see non-development questions on this developer-specific mailing list.
Ideally, these sorts of questions would never come to us. However, I've seen a number of them recently, and that bothers me. These sorts of messages are becoming a pet peeve of mine.
So in the future, I'd really appreciate us forwarding these people to one of the other, more relevant, mailing lists that PDFZone is gracious enough to host for us. Or at the very least, replying privately when the answer has nothing to do with the list topic.
Reality check: I'm feeling a bit grumpy this moring, so it could just be me. Am I out of line here?
--Mark Storer Software Engineer Cardiff Software #include <disclaimer> typdef std::disclaimer<Cardiff> Discard;
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