This article explains how to create PDF documents from any XML format.
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This blog describes how fonts are included (a.k.a embedded) in PDF documents
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How to set adobe as the default program for PDF
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If you have to choose between an HTML form and a PDF form - or maybe you are required to support both - then it is good to know about the differences between these two forms and what they have in common.
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This blog article looks at extracting text from a PDF
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In this article, first, string interpolation is introduced briefly by contrasting it with some earlier approaches. Following that I'll show how to marry string interpolation with the previously introduced monadic generators.
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A question that I often hear is: "how can I change the graphics of my PDF such as replacing text with some other text or replace a logo with another logo?" In general this is not a good idea. PDF is not designed for editing; it is designed as an end format much like ink on paper. Nevertheless there may be circumstances - such as when you don't have access to the source format - when editing a PDF is a requirement. This article explains the basics of PDF graphics and how graphics can be edited if you really have to.
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This post shows a single page ASP.NET application that allows the user to:
Upload PDF documents, drag and drop pages between PDF document and assemble new documents and download the modified PDF documents
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In this post we explain a framework for generating such formatted output using distributed generator functions. The framework is based on a technique heavily exploited in the functional programming world, called monads. With this technique arbitrary complex calling convention can be hidden in a small library, which can be extended later without affecting the actual generation logic.
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We recently encountered reports that Adobe Reader XI wants to install Asian language packs for files that got generated by our software and that are in fact, completely “western”.
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Adobe LiveCycle Rights Management is a server-based security system that provides dynamic control over PDFs. It is a complex solution which, besides PDF, supports many document formats e.g. Microsoft Word
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It is easy to print PDF documents in a application using the standard 'PrintDialog' in .NET. How to do so is described in the print pdf from wpf article. However, the dialog being used is the standard one and is rather limited in it's functionally. It does not give you a preview either on how the document will look like when its printed and some common print options are missing.
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The Hague has seen some interesting events lately. First, the World Forum centre hosted the Nuclear Summit, which Obama called ‘gezellig’ (cozy). And last week, the Microsoft TechDays 2014 flooded it with Microsoft developers. Since we are located in the Netherlands, the TallComponents engineering team took two days off from support and development and headed towards The Hague. As one of the members of this team, I am sharing my thoughts with you.
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A customer noticed that we use Bouncy Castle internally and asked us whether the Heartbleed vulnariblity affects our libraries.
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After a PDF document is rasterized, why do we see jaggies around lines?
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In most – if not all – graphical systems, it is possible to apply some transformation on graphical elements in order to render them in a certain way. These transformations can often be combined in a particular order to yield a new transformation.
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You probably all have seen PDF documents that have very fat graphics when viewed at a low zoom level. And, when zooming in, the fat graphics disappear, and slim down to something more sensible.
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PDF files can be secured with a user password and an owner password. In a way these passwords are very related, as they both control the level of access that you have on a document. But there are some differences, and we sometimes get questions about these, in particular what it means for encryption.
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PDF documents have the ability to place particular graphics in layers. When they do, it becomes possible to select certain layers for viewing in a viewer. This feature is often very useful for complex drawings so that users can restrict the view to the parts that they are interested in. The image below shows a typical example; this pdf contains two layers: and image layer (which is active) and a grid layer (which is inactive)
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Rendering a PDF page may take long (>100 ms). In order to keep the UI responsive, it should not be performed on the UI thread.
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One of the reasons for choosing .NET as a development platform has always been platform independence. In many ways, .NET indeed offers this. But there are some issues and the following article shows one of them.
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Some customers indicated that they were having issues running PDFRasterizer.Net on Mono. And although we do not officially support mono, we decided to do some experiments with it nonetheless.
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Starting with version 4.0 of PDFRasterizer.NET, we will make our PDF render engine extensible in the sense that you can plug-in your own output device. This should enable developers to render (or convert) PDF to e.g. SVG, HTML5 or something else. This also serves an internal purpose; conversions that we already offer (e.g. render PDF to a GDI bitmap or XPS) will be implemented using this same plug-in API.
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This article describe some of the bumps we encountered setting up TeamCity.
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WinRT edition of PDFRasterizer now 3-4 times faster
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Today we released a beta version of PDFRasterizer.NET 4.0 (4.0.0.3) that includes a WinRT edition. It took us a little bit longer than we hoped for. I want to explain why. In addition it also includes a Silverlight 4 edition.
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We have just released a PDFRasterizer.NET 4.0 Beta that includes a WinRT edition. To join the beta group, send a request to sales@tallcomponents.com.
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As of today (October 1, 2012), we have discontinued PDFWebViewer.NET 1.0. We will not release version 2.0.
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This blog describes the workaround for the Windows 8 error described in the previous blog "Windows 8 Release Preview – to boldly go where…"
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We ecountered an error in Windows 8 - Debugging revealed that stream.ReadByte() would sometimes leave the stream position far beyond the end of the stream. This only happened in combination with a call to stream.Seek().
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In order to find text, it is important to scan content in the correct order. This article looks at this process
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Earlier we posted that creating WinRT editions should be painless. Well, today we rewrite that “should”. Our earlier blog mostly talked about deployment, assuming that the WinRT graphical API would basically be similar to the non-Metro API. This assumption turned out to be incorrect. WinRT does not offer GDI+ (System.Drawing), nor does it offer WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) in all its glory. It does appear to be remarkably similar to the SilverLight API, but there are some serious differences.
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Our initial findings after examining the possibility of offering WinRT editions
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Ever ran PEVerify on a Silverlight assembly, and got many errors?
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In PDF, there are often images that actually consist of a collection of smaller ones, neatly put next to each other.Rendering these images seems easy enough in GDI+: just call the proper “DrawImage” method and that’s it. But then you discover that there are ugly stripes between the images.
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We recently encountered a PDF file, that we were able to convert to a WPF FixedDocument instance, and view in a standard DocumentViewer
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How small should Silverlight be?I am not talking about market share, nor am I comparing it to HTML5. No: how small should it be compared to its big brother WPF?
If you start porting existing WPF code to Silverlight, you will soon discover that quite a bit is missing. MSDN does not help here. It does list some differences, but it does not say anything about the issues below.
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A while ago, we got notified that PDFRasterizer.Net was hacked. Some guy – it probably is a guy – posted it at a Czech forum. I could not actually access the hacked software, as I did not have sufficient rights, but it was obvious. There were even requests for hacking some of our other libraries
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During the implementation of PDF soft masks in our WPF version of PDFRasterizer.NET we realized that there is little information about WPF opacity masks on the internet. The only information that exists is about applying masks declaratively (in XAML) but it is unclear how to use them imperatively.
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This article descibes the puzzling behavior of BitmapEncoder.Save
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In this post I will roughly outline the architecture of our HTML to PDF converter. I believe it applies largely to any HTML consumer
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This article is about a PDF document from a customer where we failed to geometrically sort the glyphs correctly.
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Among other tests, we use the W3C CSS 2.1 test suite to assure the quality of our HTML to PDF converter WebToPDF.NET.
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One of our customers reported a problem with our HTML to PDF converter: we broke lines at different positions than the major browsers did.
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A customer reported a problem with our HTML to PDF converter. The problem was that the background color of cells was not being respected
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Having to deal with malloc and free was not always fun in the old days. Garbage collection can be a great thing. Provided that one does not store everything in a global variable and one writes a destructor for the occasional object that grabs some system resource.
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GDI+ includes a built-in decoder for EMF but it does not include a built-in encoder (see https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb882579(v=vs.110).aspx). Consequently, you can read an EMF, but not write it. Atleast, not through GDI+. If you use the Metafile.Save method (which is the natutal thing to do) then you will actually save a PNG and loose the vector graphics.
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When CSS documents are rendered to paged media, such as PDF pages, one of the very first requests is to add a page number to each page. In CSS3 this is recognized and included in the specification by means of page counters. This blog covers our experience with page counters and how we implemented them in WebToPDF (which has been discontinued at this time).
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If a PDF document has Reader Extensions enabled, then certain features that are normally only available in Adobe Acrobat are also available in the free Adobe PDF Reader. These features include saving (form) data locally and applying digital signatures.
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Digital signatures can be used to authenticate the source of a PDF document (who signed it?) and to provide the integrity of a PDF document (did the document change after it was signed?). In this article I will show how to apply one or more digital signatures and how to verify digital signatures using PDFKit.NET 3.0.
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