What is a good report generation (i.e. PDF reports) that can be used with Objective-C on mac? - objective-c

I am creating a program for mac that needs to generate reports and be able to print them as PDF files. I would rather find an already created library for this rather than hard-coding everything, but I can't find anything yet. Do you recommend any report generation libraries that can be used in Objective-C?
Thanks for your help!

Haven't looked at it in a pretty long time, but you might want to check out ReportMill. It goes way back to the NeXTSTEP days.

If you are online and can call a web service, then you can get Docmosis to produce a PDF report and deliver it wherever. I've seen this done in objectve-c from an iPad.

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Extract Font from PDF using GdPicture

According to their website (http://www.gdpicture.com/products/managed-pdf/) you have the ability to extract fonts from a PDF file. However, I can't seem to find the functionality to do this. I have encountered several methods to add them, but none to extract them (and they don't show as embedded files). Has anyone tried to do this, or have experience with GdPicture?
Version: 14 (Current)
Disclosure: I am part of the ORPALIS technical staff that edits the GdPicture.NET SDK, that's why I know there's an ongoing communication about this already.
It is my understanding that you have a support case open for a merging issue relative to fonts and as you know, our development team is currently working on a fix that will solve it so I strongly recommend that you wait for them to finish.
There's no extraction of the embedded font as you might expect at the moment but the development team is also working on one, we will let you know as soon as it is available (it should be very soon).
You can get information about (already) embedded fonts using the GetFontCount, IsFontEmbedded, GetFontName and GetFontType methods.
You can also add new embedded fonts (of different types) using the AddFontFromFileU, AddStandardFont, AddTrueTypeFont, AddTrueTypeFontFromFile, AddTrueTypeFontFromFileU and AddTrueTypeFontU methods.

VB 2013 Embedded resources

I just wanted to get clarification on the approach I'm taking with my program. I'm making a program with custom interface for achiving folders. I would like to use 7zip if possible. In the past I have written batch scripts to that use 7zip command line for archiving. If I want to use my VB tool on a system that doesn't have this available, I would like for this to be embedded in my app.
My question is that know how to embed an exe in a VB app, but does this make it immediately available for use in the program no matter where I use it? Or it make the exe available to be deployed somewhere on the station, then I would have to call it from the disk and then possibly delete it when I'm done?
I've done some searching online for similar applications, but am still unsure of how to use embedded files. I'm not looking for example code. Just clarification on whether I can immediately call the exe from within my app, or I embedding just means I can place that file somewhere on the station that I move my app to and then use it? Clarification on this would be most welcome. Thanks!!!

Add watermark to various documents investigation

I've been asked to investigate the feasibility of adding watermarks to documents when printed through our application. The documents will consist of word, pdf and cad.
The interface of the application is vb6 with a plethora of vc6 dll's.
I can see a couple of possible solutions:
Convert all documents to PDF, add a watermark and then print.
Find a print driver that will add a watermark to all documents prior to printing and install it and reenable it at runtime if it gets disabled for any reason.
3rd Party suites are possibility (we use Volo View Express for viewing CAD files) but since this application is nearing end-of-life we wouldn't want to spend too much on it.
Has anyone had any experience of the above? Any gotcha's that will bog me down?
Tracker Software has a good set of PDF api's that that will allow you to implement the solution you already have in mind. I've used their Image and PDF libraries quite a bit with a lot of success in both VB6 and .NET. Single user licenses are not expensive (depending on how you look at it I guess), and I've found support to be excellent as well.

Anyway to automatically convert DWF to PDF?

Our eTendering solution, www.monaqasat.com, currently works exclusively with PDF documents for various reasons, some of them being security. We are being asked if we can support DWF documents. For this to happen, we would need to find a way to automatically convert DWF documents to PDF, using some kind of Unix application.
Does anybody know any such application, preferably using Rails or Java?
Thanks,
.Karim
http://www.autodwg.com/pdf/
http://www.dwgto.com/
http://www.aidecad.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PDF_software
http://www.cogniview.com/convert-pdf-to-excel/category/pdf/
Suggestion would be to install a software printer call its APIs and pass dwf and get back pdf and then apply security as needed.
Autodesk has its DWF Toolkit available at
http://www.autodesk.com/dwftoolkit
It contains full source code in C++ to read & write DWF files, so it should be reasonably easy to make it run under Linux and to use a PDF library to write the output.

A technology for reading pdfs online with annotations?

is there an open source solution that displays PDFs for online reading? It has to be searchable much like google books and if possible has the ability to display annotations?
By "online reading" I'll assume you mean without a PDF reader plugin on the client. In that case you'll need to convert to HTML
http://pdftohtml.sourceforge.net/
If you don't mind losing the ability to copy text then converting to PNG may give you a more accurate rendering
http://www.imagemagick.org/
Regardless of the output format you can manage your searching using the original PDF data. One technology for this is mnogosearch
http://www.mnogosearch.org/
Monogosearch uses pdftotext internally, you may find this useful if you want to write your own search routines. pdftotext is part of the Xpdf suite of utilities
http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/about.html
All of the tools listed above are available on Windows or Linux
You may also be interested in the Vuzit DocuPub Platform: http://vuzit.com/products/docupub_platform
The display technology itself is not open source, but they provide an API to access their service, so perhaps it is worth investigating.
Don't know if you are looking a software to install or some service to pay for...
I've read a lot about www.getbackboard.com (this is not advertising, only reporting something I've read about, that maybe fits your needs.. ;)
Not sure if they do annotations, but both of these will show PDFs quite well:
http://pdfmenot.com
http://docs.google.com
ICEPdf recently released their code as open source. It is Java based.
PyPdf is really nice. It supports reading the text as well as encryption which I know that itextsharp does not.
Of course you'd have to program in python as IronPython's class libraries aren't quite to the point where you can ref them from another language and use them. (But I imagine they will be someday soon)
PyPdf
This is not open source, but check it out anyways. You can download a free trial of their SDK to try it out. Reading PDF's and their annotations is not simple and I wouldn't trust a production app to open source decoders.
Here is an online demo.
http://www.atalasoft.com/ajaxannotations/default.aspx
Another good pdf reader is FoxitReader.