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
Post a new Forum Topic
Last updated
jice 20th of june 2016
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text color
Thu, 2012-04-12 20:49 — jeanjumpI am trying to come up with an off blue color for my text using PDF Include. I downloaded some freeware called color spy and it told me the red,green,blue values for the color I am trying to create are 25,123,181. when I code the following statement the result is I cannot see any text at all. What am I doing wrong?
"RUN pdf_text_color ("pdffile",25.0,123.0,181.0)."
inserting .tif images into PDF file
Mon, 2012-04-02 19:01 — jeanjumpDoes anyone know if it is possible to use PDFinclude to insert .tif images into a PDF file instead of .jpg files for images?
Is it possible to use an external .p to add additional content?
Thu, 2012-03-22 15:59 — xscottehxHi All,
Just wondering is it possible to start a pdfinclude file in one .p then run another .p to generate some content? My program just seems to output whatever the first procedure has done nothing of the second, it doesnt look like i can define a shared stream within the pdfinc. I am using the latest version of pdfinc with progress version 10.2c.
Thanks in Advance,
xscottehx
Error while using Turkish fonts (ISO-8859-9 or Win1254)
Thu, 2012-03-08 13:37 — mucipHi,
First of all thanks a lot for this amazing tool...
I just seen this tool. I'm very new on this. I am trying to test but I couldn't write Turkish fonts on PDF document from Progress Database?
How can I do this?
Regards,
Mucip:)
XML Documentation
Tue, 2012-01-24 13:57 — Boomn4x4Is there any documentation available regarding creating PDF documents from XML data? I do see the xml sample included with the library, however, it does not seem to do exactly what I want. The documentation provided only explains the pdf_load_xml function, I do not see any documentation for the various other xml functions.
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.tif attachment
Mon, 2011-12-12 20:30 — jeanjumpThe .jpg on the website looks huge!!! I am going to try and attach the .tif (prior to Irfanview conversion to see if it looks blown up too.
- jeanjump's blog
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third requested attachment
Mon, 2011-12-12 19:41 — jeanjumpAttaching "a small simple .p to reproduce the problem? (like pdf_new, add the image and pdf_close)".
Adobe error Insufficient data for an image
Fri, 2011-12-09 23:04 — jeanjumpWe are using Irfanview to convert .tif to .jpg and then using PDFinclude to insert the .jpg(s) into a .pdf. We started getting an out of memory error with Irfanview so we downloaded the most recent version of that software (running 2009 now instead of 2003). This eliminated the Irfanview error but now the .pdf file we are creating via Progress is showing a "ghost" image of each .jpg three times on the same page (size is greatly reduced) and throwing the Adobe error "Insufficient data for an image". Any help is appreciated.
Use of Fonts in PDFInclude form fields
Mon, 2011-11-14 12:21 — xscottehxHi All,
Is there anyway to change the font type when using Open office to create form fields. I can only seem to get one font and change the size. This makes it difficult if i want to highlight a value in bold.
I am Using OO 3.1 and the lastest version of PDF Include.
Thanks,
Scott
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PDFInclude Template with Form Fields
Thu, 2011-11-10 14:54 — xscottehxHi All,
I have used PDFinclude for over a year now. I have used templates successfully. I now however cannot get the pdf template to work when creating form fields through adobe acrobat pro.
I am generating a pdf through open office. I then use this pdf in adobe acrobat pro and create a single form text field and then save this as a adobe acrobat 4.0 and later file. I have attached the file and code. Any help would be much appreciated. I am using progress 10.2b i am still using the older of the two pdfincludes (is it v3?).
Thanks,
Scott
appServer problem
Fri, 2011-11-04 15:52 — sam_o2011I've been using PDF include for many years but have recently tried to deploy it running under an appServer agent. I've isolated the problem to the pdf_load_external procedure. A symptom of the problem is that when this code is run:
/* If we can put the data into a Character Field then do so.
Then change any Xobject references within the external file. This is
due to duplication of Object names when using multiple external PDF
files */
ASSIGN iFileSize = GET-SIZE(mFile)
iPointer = 1
iMemSize = 10000.
PDF template on UNIX AIX
Fri, 2011-10-28 16:09 — aeloHi everyone,
I'm new to PDF Include.
I test it on Windows and it seems to work nice.
But now, I'm trying to make the same on UNIX AIX : generating a pdf by filling the fields of an existing PDF Template (the same one used under Windows).
Everything seems to work nice with the data I added by Progress, but the data existing in the PDF Template does not appear in the PDF result.
When I open the file I got the Acrobat message "XObject not found : BV1.", where "BV1" is the page Ident in teh PDF template.
pdf_text_xy cannot be zero!!
Thu, 2011-09-15 18:29 — NadinePlease could someone assist. I am really new to PDF and Progress so am hoping that someone can help me. Creating PDF from progress I get the above error and am then unable to open the PDF as it says that it is damaged. Anyone know what the problem is.
PLEASE OH PLEASE HELP THE NEWBIE!!
** No B_TT_Object record is available. (91)
Wed, 2011-09-14 17:17 — zaphodGetting this error with the latest version of PDFInclude when using a PDF form template generated using OpenOffice 3.3.
See attached files.
{pdf/pdf_inc.i "THIS-PROCEDURE"}
RUN pdf_new ("Spdf","test.pdf").
RUN pdf_open_PDF("Spdf","ooform.pdf","OO").
RUN pdf_new_page("Spdf").
RUN pdf_use_PDF_page("Spdf","OO",1).
RUN pdf_fill_text("Spdf","Field1","12345","").
RUN pdf_fill_text("Spdf","Field2","ABCDE","").
RUN pdf_close("Spdf").
How to write a chinese big5 string into pdf using PDFInclude?
Tue, 2011-08-16 21:08 — ericzhaI thank the procudure pdf_set_base14_codepage & pdf_encoding are useful,
but do not get any sample or document, I am trying.
Would you help me please, thank you.
| 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 |
