Q: The company I work for has asked me to recommend a PDF library to
generate some reports.
I am very familiar with the Interactive Field handling capabilities of
PDFTron, but know nothing
about its text handling capabilities. In the examples, I found an
"Edit Text" and a "Text Extract" app,
which are close but not quite what I am looking for.
We don't need anything fancy (like PDFLib's typographical features). A
"Hello World" application,
in C++, will suffice.
I found a "Hello, World" type of application in the Samples
(PDFPackageTest).
I would like to make sure I am on the right track. Is the attached app
the proper starting point?
Is this as high level as I can work with Text?
writer.Begin(page);
Font font = Font::Create(doc, Font::e_helvetica);
writer.WriteElement(builder.CreateTextBegin(font, 24));
Element element = builder.CreateTextRun("Report");
element.SetTextMatrix(1, 0, 0, 1, 50, 700);
element.GetGState().SetFillColorSpace(ColorSpace::CreateDeviceRGB());
element.GetGState().SetFillColor(ColorPt(0, 0, 0));
writer.WriteElement(element);
writer.WriteElement(builder.CreateTextEnd());
writer.End();
----------------
A: The approach you are using (i.e. ElementBuilder & ElementWrtier) to
generate PDF reports should work.
In case you don’t need high-level of control, it may be simpler to
generate content from WPF/FlowDocuments (e.g. along the lines of
Xaml2Pdf sample - http://www.pdftron.com/pdfnet/samplecode.html#Xaml2Pdf)
... or from an HTML string (see HTML2PDF sample -
http://www.pdftron.com/pdfnet/samplecode.html#Html2Pdf).
For a more extensive example of how to use ElementBuilder &
ElementWrtier please see ElementBuilder sample (http://www.pdftron.com/
pdfnet/samplecode.html#ElementBuilder).