Is there a good ActiveX/COM component to "print" to PDF? - pdf

Clutching at straws here, I think I remember seeing a solution to this somewhere but can't find it now.
The issue is that I need a Windows application (not .Net) to be able to generate PDFs. The "standard" solution is to use something like PDF995 or CutePDF which create a dummy printer that your application can then print to and it is redirected to a PDF file. The problem is that to control those printers requires updating INI files or registry keys and that is error prone and often runs into concurrency problems.
Building the PDF file programmatically isn't an option, it needs to be able to take the output that would normally be sent to a printer, or possibly convert directly from an Excel file.
Ideally, I'd just pass the Excel file to a COM/ActiveX object and it would write to a file I specify. Next best option would be for it to create a separate printer per print job or have some reasonable way of guaranteeing the filename I give will have the document I print.
This Excel to PDF Batch converter might do the trick as at least it has a command line mode, has anyone tried that? It would only solve the problem for Excel files though.
So, is there a better solution?
(As a side note, for Visual FoxPro reports XFRX works really well, it converts the report directly to a PDF without needing a printer driver.)

You might want to look at BullZip (google it because I cannot add hyperlinks yet). We recently had Jody Meyer present this tool at the Detroit Area Fox User Group (previously shown at the Grand Rapids Area Fox User Group too). It was a great session.
She showed how to use the COM object to automate a ton of the BullZip features including the name of the file and properties like author and keywords. Watermarks are a snap too. It is simple and straightforward and her example was rock solid. Tons of features already done for you so you can simply re-engineer the demo form.
You can download it on the DAFUG Web site, in the downloads folder. File name is BullZipDemo.zip (google Detroit Area Fox User Group) and add the folder and filename.
Rick
VFP MVP

For this scenario I would recommend Amyuni PDF Converter. It provides a Microsoft Certified PDF Printer and ActiveX/.Net controls to communicate with it. Concurrency issues can be avoided by using these controls.
Disclaimer: I am part of the development team of this product.

Related

Selecting text and image from pdf through any programming language

I'm trying to develop a tool/web application such that it will import a PDF file and I need to select text and images available in PDF by selecting them with a mouse click and marking them as title,content and image with a button click (3 different button) where the marked contents and image will be copied to clipboard or will be pasted into a word document which is going to be a another part. So in which programming language is this possible to work with and carry on ?
I'd probably try researching pure browser-side solution using pdf.js and clipboard API.
Otherwise, you'd still need clipboard API in the browser and the server-side may actually be powered by any programming language which can be hooked into a web server and has a library to parse PDFs.
You said nothing at all about your prospective server platform but to name a few, .NET has PdfSharp which is able to read PDFs, Python has a host of tools available for it. After all, there exist a bunch of command-line utilities to extract data from PDF which can be called using any PL able to call external processes.
Note that this only appears to be a simpler solution than using pdf.js but note that unless your PDFs are really uniform (say, invoices created by some piece of software), and so you'll be able to make your PDF parser know which bits of data it has to extract and return, the parser will need to returl all the data it extracted to the client, and you'll need to somehow render it all there. May be it's exactly what you need but maybe not.
Since PDFs are really tailored for typesetting and not presenting information in a structured manner, I'd try to piggyback on an already hard-core PDF rendering solution which runs in the browser, so see above.

Need to print a PDF from .net and select different trays for output

My company is moving to a new system which has a very poor printing system in place but it does create PDF's on the file system.
My Boss has asked me to create an application to print all the PDF's based on a JOB number.
I've gotten the filesystem search working, I have used the acrobat sdk to open each file and find certain strings to determine which pages go where.
The problem I'm dealing with is that the Acrobat SDK doesn't seem to support choosing printer settings.
My first thought was no big deal I just change the default windows printer and just change the tray so the invoice part and equipment listing go to white paper from tray 1, and the remittance goes to tray 2 on blue paper.
It seems like the printdocument in .net can handle alot of printer settings but I'm not sure if a PDF can be used with a print document.
Looking for any advice or assistance.
Thanks,
Joshua
I found the answer was to use Win32.
Here was the website that helped me get through some of the hurdles:
http://edinkapic.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-to-set-printer-default-paper-bin-in.html
The underlying problem is that PDFs are combination of vector graphics for the text and bitmapped images. It all needs to be rendered into a format the printer understands before being printable.
Ghostscript does this very nicely and if you need to do it from .Net, GhostScript.Net provides an excellent vb.Net interface.
The problem I'm dealing with is that the Acrobat SDK doesn't seem to support choosing printer settings.
You can't use the desktop version of Acrobat for this, since it's not designed for unattended operation and requires a user interface. Also, I believe it violates Adobe's license.

PDF conversion service

I need to develop a service able to convert MS Office and Open Office documents to PDF. And the PDF`s also need to be commentable when opened in ADOBE Reader.
I have used a piece of software from www.neevia.com. And it does the conversion, but is not able to make the PDF´s commentable and is therefore useless in my scenario.
Ideally I would like a piece of software that is monitoring a directory, and when a file is commited to that directory, the software detects this, fetches the file, converts it, and puts it in another directory. This way I can programmatically put the file I want converted in the IN folder and monitor the OUT folder to fetch the file when converted.
So do anyone know a piece of software capable of converting MS Office and Open Office files to commentable PDF`s?
It sounds like you're after the "Extend Features In Acrobat Reader" document rights feature that's part of Acrobat Professional. If you want a programmatic way of doing it then Adobe LiveCycle is the only game in town. This is one of the features that Adobe keeps for itself and no third party is legally allowed to provide it.
You could programmatically, using office automation, print documents to a postscript printer driver to get a postscript file, then use GhostScript to convert the PS file to PDF. Not sure of the commentable features supported by Adobe Reader as opposed to the full version of Acrobat, but it should create a reasonably well supported PDF file.
A-PDF may do what you want, it's web site claims it can convert office docs into PDF including batch convertion with watching a folder.
Both Office 2007 and OpenOffice can save directly to PDF, so you could automate that process.
However, changing the "document rights" of the PDF to allow commenting is something that only Adobe Acrobat can do. (This is Adobe's way of selling more product). There are other 3rd-party tools out there that claim to be able to do it (google change pdf +"document rights"), but I can't vouch for any of them.
I believe the commentable features are part of the PDF software, and not the file. Adobe Professional will allow to add comments, while the reader has less capabilities.
Hmmm, you can develop your own or just buy it off the shelf. My company (shameless plug) has a product that does server based PDF Conversion for common Office formats and can be invoked via a web service.
Blogged about it here. Making office work reliably on the server (32bit/64bit, Win2K3/Win2K8) is challenging to say the least.

Tools to manipulate doc file and convert them to pdf

I am looking for some good tools (free or paid, though free tool is always preferred)
for doing following operations on word doc files:
Manipulation of doc/docx/text files (like replacing some placeholders with DB values) as well as
converts doc files to .pdf
Because, I will be using this tool in my WCF service library,
So I am looking for a code library and not for a GUI based product.
Please share your experience regarding same.
Thank you!
Aspose has a decent collection of MS Office and PDF manipulation libraries.
Aspose Homepage
On the off chance that you're only looking for PDFs for viewing or archival purposes, you could also setup a PDF print driver and print your office files into a given location using Automation. You could also edit Office files through Automation although this may be tedious.
VSTO would give you access to the save as PDF from the Office applications.
Please see my answer to a related question on SO where I recommend a number of ways to convert your Word document to a format that is more easy to manipulate programmatically (using XSL-FO).

How to convert Word and Excel documents to PDF programmatically?

We are developing a little application that given a directory with PDF files creates a unique PDF file containing all the PDF files in the directory. This is a simple task using iTextSharp. The problem appears if in the directory exist some files like Word documents, or Excel documents.
My question is, is there a way to convert word, excel documents into PDF programmatically? And even better, is this possible without having the office suite installed on the computer running the application?
Office 2007 allows for this. I have found PDFCreator to be good, the VBA is included in sample files, and have heard that CutePDF is also good. PDFCreator and CutePDF are free.
To work without Office, you would need viewers, as far as I know:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c8378bf4-996c-4569-b547-75edbd03aaf0&displaylang=EN
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=95E24C87-8732-48D5-8689-AB826E7B8FDF&displaylang=en
I needed to do this myself, but managed to get it done with .Net and without 3rd party tools:
MSDN: Saving Word 2007 Documents to PDF and XPS Formats
Pretty simple, about 50 lines of code. However I think you will need Word 2007 installed on the machine as well as the ability to Save As PDF
To convert Word documents to PDF, take a look at jWordConvert, a java library that can do exactly that. This will not work with the Excel files though, only with the Word files. The language is not Sharp, it's Java but you could switch to use IText (which is java) instead of ITextSharp.
You can also use a component like activePDF's DocConverter to convert a lot formats to PDF.
Use PDF maker that comes with adobe 7- 9
I just used this code Covert Doc to PDF
I'm surprised Aspose wasn't mentioned here, it's easy, simple, and reliable. Downside is that it is not free.
I've used iTextSharp in the past, it's really good, easy to install (one DLL I believe), the merge takes a bit of tindering so it's not as easy to use as Aspose, but hey, it's free so that is the best part.
TallPDF.NET (comes with a hefty price tag) allows you to serve dynamic PDF from any .NET application including ASP.NET pages and web services.
PDFEdit (free and open source) is an editor for manipulating PDF documents. It has a GUI version and a command-line interface. Scripting is used to a great extent in the editor and almost anything can be scripted. It is possible to create your own scripts or plugins.
The most common way to convert files to a pdf is to print them to a pdf printer driver. There are a number of such drivers, one that i know of that will do the job is Black Ice.
Another is to use Adobe Acrobat's SDK. from memory its very expensive.
Its been a while since i have actually done any work with converting pdf's and the landscape may have changed.