PDFinclude is an open source Progress utility for dynamically generating reports in Adobe PDF file format without having to use third-party tools or utilities.
PDFInclude is a Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS), distributed under the Eclipse Public License.
PDFinclude is a stand-alone component that defines a toolset of Progress functions and procedures that aid in the output of a PDF file directly from 4GL/ABL, without having to generate a separate text file first (as in text2pdf.p).
Open Source does not always mean free as in free beer. In order to be able to spend more time on PDFInclude, I need some sponsors. Also, if you wish to see a new or improved functionality, you can offer me a bounty. Lastly if this software is of some use for you and your company, then I'd like to hear from it, and you could consider to donate (via Paypal in USD or Euros). Thanks in advance!
Welcome in the PDF Include group. When you are using PDF Include, you are encouraged to subscribe to this group where you find the on-line tools to collaborate and discuss PDF Include. There is a discussion forum, you can submit issues (for bugs and enhancement requests), you can add new pages and other content, and best of all: there is an e-mail list. So subscribe, and then don't forget to go to your subscription details to enable the e-mail notification!
The PDF file format is an industry-standard for electronic document viewing. The PDF format allows for documents that can be accessed by a broad range of hardware and software devices (including PDAs and Internet browsers).
PDFinclude utilizes Progress code that is compliant with versions 8 and 9 of the Progress 4GL and the same source code can be used on multiple OS platforms - including Windows, AIX, Unixware, Solaris etc. - while running in different application environments (eg: GUI, CHUI, web-enabled and n-tier).
New!
- 5th of may 2017: a new web site for pdfInclude has been published :)
- 20th of June 2016: pdfInclude v5.1 is available from me, please contact me using OEHive private messages. All the short comings of the 3.3 version about the pdf parser and filling forms have been corrected, and a lot of new functionality added. See readme.pdf, itself generated using pdfInclude.
- 16th of January 2011: I finally found the time to publish the last fixes and evolutions! The big news is the support for filling OpenOffice.org generated forms! Acrobat (latest versions were not supported anyway) is not needed anymore in order to create forms to be filled with PDFinclude! Among the other news, you can now rotate text at any angle, skew ans scale text.
- 2nd of March 2010: The SVN repository has just been updated. This is the very last version of pdfinclude, containing all patches gathered from the PEG, lots of bug fixes, plus new exciting functionalities. Please test before I publish 3.3.4! You can download the last development version.
Main features
• supports international characters (East Europe, Cyrillic, Turkish) for variable width base fonts only (Times and Helvetica). To be published in next version - see SVN version meanwhile. For courier (or if you wish to embed fonts in the pdf file), you can use a font specially defined for the code page as described there.
• supports custom True Type fonts (including Bar Coding fonts), and all 14 pdf base fonts
• supports remapping of characters
• supports ISO page formats A0,A1,A2,A3,A4,A5,A6,B5,LETTER,LEGAL,LEDGER
• supports portrait or landscape, and custom page formats, custom margins…
• supports document encryption (requires procrypt.dll)
• supports compression (requires zlib1.dll)
• includes graphic (geometric) procedures: lines, circles, eclipses, Bézier curves
• includes procedures to set Bookmarks show a Table of Content
• includes procedures for automatic page header and footer management
• include procedure to add watermarks
• supports text rotation
• supports html-ish tagged text for bold , italic and colour
• supports underline
• supports automatic pg line break and text justification
• supports JPEG images (GIF & PNG support in development)
• supports annotations (links, notes, stamps, mark-ups)
• supports rotating text at any angle, skewing and scaling it
• supports loading an Adobe Distiller or OpenOffice PDF generated file to be used as a template (with limitations) – the file might contain images or embedded fonts To be published in next version - see SVN version for images and font support
• supports filling OpenOffice.org generated forms
• supports filling Adobe forms - Adobe version max = 5 ; see previous point...
• tools to create tables, calendars, matrices
• no external libraries are required except for compression and encryption
• comes with a lot of code examples
Downloads
See "attachments" at the bottom of this page for the downloads, including a download of a PowerPoint presentation from the Michigan PUG.
The big .zip download includes a Word document, which is the PDF Include documentation. I've also attached a PDF of that. Thanks Peter Frederick for sending the PDF!
You can always download the last development version from the SVN repository.
Contributions
- Pro-Sys Consultants are the original authors of PDF Include.
- jice is the current maintainer. I do it in my free time, so please do not expect too much!
You are welcome to submit patches through the mailing list. After review and discussion, they will be included in next release.
If you have to add functionality and/or modify PDFInclude for your own project, you are encouraged to submit the source code (although it is not required by the license) so that we can all improve the software and bring it to next level.
Also see:
License (Eclipse Public License)
Project page for issue tracking
Forum
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Last updated
jice 20th of june 2016
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PDF Include slow
Mon, 2010-06-21 08:48 — LotusEHello,
We've been using pdf include with several of our customers now and all works well. Except for one customer: it takes more than 5 minutes to generate a 24-page pdf, whereas this normally only takes about 20 seconds with ohter customers' systems.
The client is working in a Terminal Server environment with a very tight security policy. We suspect that this might be causing the slowdown, but we don't know what to look for.
Could you give us possible reasons for a slowdown? Have you ever heard from other people that reported the same problem?
Change Font Subsets
Mon, 2010-05-31 15:11 — BigaAny idea how can I change TrueType subsets?
I need some special south-slav characters, for example capital C with caron but if I use Arial font with PDF include, I see only the basic subset. If I check Arial font in Word (Insert symbol) I see this character in Subset "Extended Latin A".
thanks,
Biga
p.s. I tried create new AFM file with TT2PT1 utility and use -l (language) switch but did not work. (there is latin1,2,4,5 options but no extended latin A,B...)
pdf_text_rotate
Wed, 2010-04-21 11:09 — xscottehxHi All,
Is it just me or does the pdf_text_rotate procedure not work?
I am trying to get a watermark to go across the page at an angle but when i add the rotate feature nothing changed no matter what the angle set.
Problem when create PDF
Thu, 2010-04-15 22:38 — yorkino83Hello every body!
Is anybody here that can help me with the PDF include? I'm new with this tool!!
The situation is this:
I'm creating a PDF Documents, and I'v already finished with that, but know I need to create just one PDF in which I can have all the PDF that I've already create.
I'm using one ".p" file for each PDF that I'm creating, to make it easy to de user, so in that way, the user makes click in a link and I run the .p file to create the PDF, and show it on the window explorer.
No accents on printing
Wed, 2010-04-07 12:04 — BigaPDF seems good both with Adobe and Foxit Reader but sending directly to the printer, the output contains illegal characters instead of accented letters. It is a printer setting problem or I have to change something in the PDF ? It is a Konica PDF capable office center.
error when loading pdf template : Could not Load DLL procedure zlib1.dll (3258)
Tue, 2010-03-30 13:52 — xscottehxCould not Load DLL procedure zlib1.dll (3258)
The above is the error message i get when trying to load in a pdf. My code is as follows:
{pdf_inc.i}
RUN pdf_new("spdf","c:\invoice.pdf").
RUN pdf_open_PDF("spdf","C:\Documents and Settings\sbrannan\Desktop\template.pdf","Inv").
RUN pdf_new_page("spdf").
RUN pdf_use_pdf_page("spdf","Inv",1).
RUN pdf_fill_text("spdf","Cost","£999.99","").
I am going to try and download zlib.dll i am unsure which directory to put it in. Im guessing the same as the other pdfinc .dll files. Any advice would be appreciated
Thanks
New version!
Wed, 2010-03-03 02:54 — jiceHi everybody!
I've just released some code in the SVN repository.
See the PdfInclude page for more info on the bug fixes and new features.
However I'm not taking over as a full time maintainer, I just do that in my free time, so please don't except too much ;-)
New development version!
Wed, 2010-03-03 02:45 — jicePDFInclude has a new version!
I've just released some code in the SVN repository.
See the PdfInclude page for more info on the bug fixes and new features.
However I'm not taking over as a full time maintainer, I just do that in my free time, so please don't except too much ;-)
License
Thu, 2010-02-25 18:23 — johnPDF Include is licensed under the conditions of the Eclipse Public License, version 1.0:
www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html
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Adobe Reader cannot open PDF
Fri, 2009-12-11 10:28 — BigaUntil this time we solved this old problem simply using Foxit Reader and recommended it to our partners.
But unfortunately some partners want send our PDFs to their customers who dont want use Foxit, Adobe is their company standard. Altough I saw this question already here, perhaps someone found solution since it...
WEBSPEED with PDFInclude
Wed, 2009-09-23 21:25 — aragmI can't generate pdf file in webserver
RUN pdf_new ("Spdf","http://example.com/pdf/Hello.pdf").
RUN pdf_new ("Spdf","c:\temp\pdf\Hello.pdf").
RUN pdf_new ("Spdf","data/programs/pdf/Hello.pdf").
what is the correct form?
need some especial settings or configuration in the server?
in local works fine, but when i put it in webserver doesn't work
any suggestion or examples that I can see with webspeed working
PDFinclude with OpenEdge 64bit
Wed, 2009-09-23 17:46 — zaphodAu secours (HELP)
I have been using PDFinclude to generate forms using PDF form fields with success using Progress 9 and
OpenEdge 10 32 bit.
I recently had to upgrade my version of OpenEdge 10.2A from 32bit to 64bit on AIX 6.1 64bit.
I made sure to extract the libz.so.1 64bit version from the zlib-1.2.3 library.
But now, the decompress function call (function found in the zlib library) returns the error code -5, so it no longer works.
Can anyone help me ?
OpenEdge 10.2A 64bit, AIX 6.1 64bit, PDFInclude 3.3.3, zlib 1.2.3
Problems using PDF template
Tue, 2009-07-07 01:05 — javacinnoHello - I am getting the following error when trying to create a PDF via existing PDF template.
However, I can not get past the "pdf_use_PDF_page" call. I always get the error:
"pdf_use_PDF_Page Invalid Page # for PDF ID = Inv stream=Spdf"
Can anyone help?
Here is my code:
{ pdf_inc.i}
RUN pdf_new ("Spdf","c:\temp\InvoiceDoc-Fill.pdf").
RUN pdf_open_PDF("Spdf","c:\temp\invForm.pdf","Inv"). /* Open Template PDF */
RUN pdf_new_page("Spdf").
RUN pdf_use_PDF_page("Spdf","Inv",1). /* Use Page 1 from Template */ /*XXXXXXXXXX THIS IS WHERE THE ERROR OCCURS XXXX*/
how can i use a blank graphical pdf file in my pdf file
Fri, 2009-04-24 11:52 — vikramkishHi,
Can anybody please let me know how to read PDF file using 4GL.
I've found a small bug in pdf_inc.p
Fri, 2009-03-13 12:30 — kzambI'm using tags with pdfInclude to change part of my text. But I noticed that sometime it works incorrect. There is no error when application works a pdf file. But when I open pdf file with Acrobat Reader it shows error 114.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| PDFinclude.ppt presentation from the Michigan PUG | 958 KB |
| PDFinfo.zip | 6.13 KB |
| PDFincludeV7-1.0.zip for v7 | 21.69 KB |
| PDFinclude3.3.3.zip for v9+ | 3.06 MB |
| PDFInclude-PRO-Documentation.pdf | 600.13 KB |
| readme.pdf for pdfInclude v5.1 | 1.63 MB |
