PDF merging
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Hi all .
i am new to squeak. I designed a template a PDF Template document. What I want if to fill the fields specified in that template with values from Squeak. Is there any package to manipulate this PDF merging?. May be in another smalltalk dialect? TIA Pablo |
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As far as I know there is not.
The company I work for does quite a bit of PDF manipulation and generation. I use PDFLib (pdflib.com) and while it does not offer Squeak language bindings it offers a wide range of language bindings. I use a combination of command line programs and a IP service, what I wrote, that allows any computer on the net work to connect and manipulate/generate PDFs. You could create a wrapper to the PDFLIb library via FFI (http:// minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/1414) but that is not something I would recommend but If you did decide to do it I would be _very_ interested in helping out. While I don't know the specifics of your situation; I would recommend that you use a library like PDFLib and write the actual pdf handling in a different language where there is more support for PDFs. Then interface those PDF handling applications via OSProcess or similar. PDFLib Light is free and offers most of the features one would require in the generation of PDFs, PDFLib+PDI offers some manipulation of PDFs and PDFLib PPS is a great product that allows you to use PDFs to make templates for things like mail merge. There are other products out there PDFLib is just the one I am most familiar with. Let us know what you decide and how things for out for you. Thanks Will On Mar 4, 2006, at 8:44 PM, Pablo Digonzelli wrote: > Hi all . > > i am new to squeak. > I designed a template a PDF Template document. > What I want if to fill the fields specified in that template with > values from Squeak. > Is there any package to manipulate this PDF merging?. > May be in another smalltalk dialect? > > TIA > Pablo > > |
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Will , thanks for your response.
I will let you know what am i doing about this. Pablo William Harford wrote: > As far as I know there is not. > > The company I work for does quite a bit of PDF manipulation and > generation. I use PDFLib (pdflib.com) and while it does not offer > Squeak language bindings it offers a wide range of language bindings. > > I use a combination of command line programs and a IP service, what I > wrote, that allows any computer on the net work to connect and > manipulate/generate PDFs. > > You could create a wrapper to the PDFLIb library via FFI (http:// > minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/1414) but that is not something I would > recommend but If you did decide to do it I would be _very_ interested > in helping out. > > While I don't know the specifics of your situation; I would recommend > that you use a library like PDFLib and write the actual pdf handling > in a different language where there is more support for PDFs. Then > interface those PDF handling applications via OSProcess or similar. > > PDFLib Light is free and offers most of the features one would > require in the generation of PDFs, PDFLib+PDI offers some > manipulation of PDFs and PDFLib PPS is a great product that allows > you to use PDFs to make templates for things like mail merge. > > There are other products out there PDFLib is just the one I am most > familiar with. > > Let us know what you decide and how things for out for you. > > Thanks > Will > > On Mar 4, 2006, at 8:44 PM, Pablo Digonzelli wrote: > >> Hi all . >> >> i am new to squeak. >> I designed a template a PDF Template document. >> What I want if to fill the fields specified in that template with >> values from Squeak. >> Is there any package to manipulate this PDF merging?. >> May be in another smalltalk dialect? >> >> TIA >> Pablo >> >> > > |
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> >> i am new to squeak.
> >> I designed a template a PDF Template document. > >> What I want if to fill the fields specified in that template with > >> values from Squeak. > >> Is there any package to manipulate this PDF merging?. > >> May be in another smalltalk dialect? People that want web-apps usually also need PDFs, so we went 3 different ways to produce PDF, each with its advantages and disadvantages: - SPDF is a native Smalltalk library that I ported from VisualWorks: it is very fast, can directly stream to sockets and provides a nice object-representation of PDF files. However it requires that you know about the internals of PDF and since there are no font-metricts, it can't do line-wrapping automatically. - Latex is another way to create PDF: It is not so fast, but especially for Seaside applications it can be very interesting. What we did, is to create a new back-end to Seaside, so that we can render the same components to produce Latex instead of HTML. This works very well, however there are no means to directly control the position of elements. Line-wrapping works of course. - Morphs are the third way to create PDF. Export them as PS and convert them to PDF using ps2pdf. With this approach it is possible to do exact positioning, line-wrapping, etc. but it is not very fast and multi page documents do not work nicely (you have to have one morph per page). I know that other people have other solutions for this problem, these are just the ways we went to satisfy different requirements. You might also want to look at FOP, a tool that generates all kind of output formats from an XML specification. Cheers, Lukas -- Lukas Renggli http://www.lukas-renggli.ch |
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In reply to this post by pablo digonzelli
Hi
Take a look to xfdf. This is an xml format you can use to fill your form's fields with values. An xfdf file will have an element linking to your pdf template and a collection of field-value elements for filling it. You can generate the file on the fly. http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/xml/xfdf_2.0_draft.pdf Pablo Digonzelli wrote: > Hi all . > > i am new to squeak. > I designed a template a PDF Template document. > What I want if to fill the fields specified in that template with values > from Squeak. > Is there any package to manipulate this PDF merging?. > May be in another smalltalk dialect? > > TIA > Pablo > > > > > |
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