World: r3wp

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.

Before I look into it, I thought I'd just ask.  We (the graphic desgner 
actually) got sent a logo graphic inside a PDF (and that is all that's 
in the PDF).  Is there an easy way of extracting the image?  I'm 
not a huge fan of selecting and cut'n'paste as it may lose sizing 
etc...  More curious than worried.

text editor

:)

It's a binary, but I've extracted it.  Thanks for the hint.

Depends -- do you want to retain vector artwork?  If not, you could 
rasterise it in Photoshop, GIMP, Seashore or other bitmap editors.

Ah, you got it...

Well, I hacked it...and have no clue if what I did would work the 
next time :)

postscript and pdf are similar formats and store images as either 
binary or as text.

unless it's one of those compressed pdf formats