World: r3wp

You have, of course, the benefit of knowing how the dialect works 
inside out. People new to the dialect would like to find out how 
it works by experimenting. Then it would be good to be more friendly, 
not causing error on missing parameters, similar to LAYOUT.

On balance, (and since I discovered the resuling PDF was a bit large), 
I think it's not worth me forking and complicating the dialect.

there's also the issue, that if we allow specifying a binary! instead 
of image! and interpert it as a jpeg file, then the dialect will 
have no default to use for the size, unless we go on and parse the 
jpeg header, or load the jpeg into a image! temporarily just to get 
its size. (binary! would have the added benefit to work also in Core, 
however that would only be for jpeg images)

Those are details. Any default is still better than an error (if 
trying to make the dialect forgiving and friendly). At least the 
user will see something appear, even if it has the wrong size and 
in the wrong position.

Can I use scripts of Oldes to get right encoding output of pdf from 
pdfMaker?

It seems that Rebol uses for my Win platform Win1257. 

In which encoding should I convert text for input to pdfMaker to 
get right accentuated characters in pdf generated by pdf maker?

the pdf format only supports adobe encoding, windows encoding and 
mac encoding. the pdf maker only uses windows encoding (which is 
basically latin1).

really? I cannot believe that PDF is not able to be in unicode. What 
is adobe encoding?

and which windows encoding? Maybe can janeks just set some flag or 
something which specifies his encoding in the file.

oldes: unfortunately, no. he has to specify the encoding in the font 
description. the only "built-in" encodings are Adobe, WinANSI (latin1) 
and Mac. I think adobe is a variant of latin1.

to support unicode you have to create a multibyte encoding for the 
fonts, and the spec does not give any detail on how this works.

openoffice, for example, creates n 256-character fonts instead.

that is, if you are using "Times", and you use more than 256 different 
characters, openoffice creates a pdf with two fonts, "Times1" and 
"Times2", each with at most 256 characters.

so i will either need to figure out how to create a font encoding 
description that works for utf-16 (but i guess it would require a 
huge table, and so would make the documents big), or i'll need to 
use the same technique as OO

I've just downloaded pdf-maker.r and I'd really appreciate some help 
to get going quickly. I've rotated a page +90 to get into landscape, 
but the texbox still  renders the text in the same way as portrait. 
Do I have to rotate each textbox too?


I also downloaded pdf-tables.r too. Does a  table handle a page break 
itself?


Talking of page breaks, in a long table which spans many pages, I'd 
like to render the column headings on each new page. Is there a variable 
I can track or an event I can listen for that lets me know that the 
text is about to flow to the next page.

Thanks a lot.

you may want to change the page size instead of rotating it.

also, since you refer to pdf-tables, i assume you dowloaded version 
1

hang on...

Version 1.5.0

pdf-tables lets you provide a function to create the pages, and you 
can still modify the output. so, you can create the headings separate 
from the table itself.

really? of pdf-maker?

Yes, pdf-tables, date 24-Jul-2003

in the header

ah, 1.5.0 of pdf-tables. you should have 1.24.0 of pdf-maker

sorry, checking...

pdf-maker: 1.27.1 3-Aug-2006

ah, right, that's the one with a few bugs fixed.

:-)

should be the latest 1.x version so you're fine.

ok.

5th argument to render-pages is a function that is called to make 
the scheleton of each page.

also, since the result is a block of pages, you can modify the result 
and add anything after the layout process.

btw, version 2 is at http://www.colellachiara.com/soft/PDFM2/pdf-maker.html

still looking for someone volunteering to write the user docs... 
:)

I can see that in the code. I'm just getting a feel for the basics 
at the moment. Ok, version 2 I'll get that.

Let me see how I get on. I'd be happy to volunteer to write the user 
docs - I'm a bit under pressure at work right now, but I would really 
like to contribute something back to you.

Can't see a link on that page to download the code.

note, v2 is quite different from v1. it hasn't been tested as extensively 
as v1 either (v1 is being used on a daily basis in many applications).

http://www.colellachiara.com/soft/PDFM2/

Got it thanks. Maybe I should stick the V1 for now then.

unless you need the advanced features in v2, yes.

Umm. If I use this;

page size 297 211
textbox ["This is a test"]

the texbox does not render. If I comment out page size, it does.

The page does flip to landscape though.

textbox default size is not dynamic, but static, so if you set a 
different page size you'll want to set a custom textbox size too

basically the above will render This is a test out of the visible 
area.

Thanks, that makes sense to me now. I'll have a bit more time tomorrow 
to think things through a bit more.

Gabriele, it would be nice to have a smaller PDF doc for v2, like 
you had for v1. Any chance ?

i don't have the time to write it at this moment... also, i'm sure 
someone other than me would have a more user-centric perspective. 
ie some of the stuff in v2 that seems trivial for me might not be 
so for other users.

Busy converting HTML template reports into PDF using PDF-Maker. Getting 
the hang of it now.  The function which calculates the textbox height 
is providing most of the work. I'm calculating page space as text 
boxes are generated. As I think in point size, I've transposed mm2pt 
to give me a pt2mm function.

Haven't had change to look at V2 yet.

change = chance.