Hi,

I have committed a PDF generator to FPC Subversion: fcl-pdf.

Why a new pascal PDF generator ?
Mainly because the existing ones written in Object Pascal suffer from several disadvantages:
- Font support usually incomplete or downright buggy.
- Dependency on a GUI (LCL, VCL, Windows).
The latter is important because the PDFs must be generated on a headless (no display) webserver.

So, the fcl-pdf package contains a PDF generating unit fppdf that does not depend on any external libraries or GUI system.

The PDF generator has the following features:
- Support for basic shapes.
- Support for basic line styles.
- Dictionary support.
- Multi-page PDF.
- Image support.
- TTF Font support.
- Font embedding.
- Unicode font support.
- Stream Compression.
- Image embedding.
- Several paper types.
- Portrait/Landscape.
- Support for multiple measurement units.
- Rotation matrix system.
- PDF creator information.
- The generated PDF passes several PDF validators.

The library is based on a library that came with FPGUI, with a feature set which came closest to what I desired. It was completed for the company I work for by Graeme Geldenhuys, and is heavily unit tested.

It is not yet feature-complete, but the above should be ample for most applications.

In the near future, I expect to commit a reporting engine which, likewise, does not need a GUI (but can use one) and uses the PDF generator as one possible backend.

Todo:
- Implement TFPCustomCanvas descendent (TPDFCanvas) that draws on a PDF. (should allow easy integration in LCL)
- Partial embedding of (unicode) fonts (only used glyphs) for smaller PDFs.
- On windows (possibly mac), allow to use native font mechanisms for extracting info from TTF files.
- Reduce memory usage by streaming finished pages to file.

Optionally:
- PDF Forms ?
- Archive format ?
- Signatures ?

Enjoy,

I would welcome additional tests/demos, suggestions, bugreports, improvements or patches.

Michael.

Michael Van Canneyt wrote

Hi, I have committed a PDF generator to FPC Subversion: fcl-pdf.

Great news of this weekend.

I'm going to test that ...

Congrats for your job!

On Sat, Mar 5, 2016 at 2:27 PM, Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
[...]

- File attachments? [1]

[1] https://github.com/libharu/libharu/blob/master/demo/attach.c

I have added it to the list in the readme file :-)

Michael.

En Sat, 05 Mar 2016 11:27:24 -0600, Michael Van Canneyt escribi?:

Great, thank you!

Jesus Reyes A.

Nice work! Certainly comes just in time as I'm looking at PDF libraries for the next work-related project.

- On windows (possibly mac), allow to use native font mechanisms for extracting info from TTF files.

Would using freetype/freetype2 make more sense? There are native implementations in the CCR and the freetype2 library interface is surprisingly simple as well.

-- Sebastian

Well, I didn't want to use external libraries.

I have no idea of the state of Freetype in CCR.
Last time I checked it, it was totally incomprehensible and hopelessly outdated code. But I certainly may be wrong there, although a quick is not exactly encouraging.

But nothing prevents the use of these libraries: since we need to 'abstract' out the relevant functionality anyway for the Windows OS, a kind of manager/driver approach such as used in other parts of the RTL is a definite possibility.

(On windows, the OS itself provides these functions, the situation is different there)

Contributions in this area are definitely welcome.

Michael.

Awesome! :-)

The PDF encryption seems optionally a nice feature too, but I don't know if everyone agrees.

Here is a demo (password: owner ):

https://github.com/libharu/libharu/raw/master/demo/encryption.pdf

Thank you?Michael Van Canneyt.

Regards, Ara

Great!
Are metadata included ?

Thanks,

R.

2016-03-05 18:27 GMT+01:00 Michael Van Canneyt :

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Roberto P. wrote

Are metadata included ?

Do you mean Author, PDF Creator, Date Modified, Keywords etc information. If so, yes that is included.

Regards,
Graeme

I have committed a PDF generator to FPC Subversion: fcl-pdf

The package must be excluded from build for msdos target because its dependencies are not available for msdos, otherwise full build will fail. There are already embedded and win16 in the exclude list.

Done, rev. 33212. Thanks for testing.

Michael.