Approach to PDF input within LC

Graham Samuel livfoss at mac.com
Tue May 10 17:46:50 EDT 2011


On Mon, 09 May 2011 18:46:10 -0500, Ken Ray <kray at sonsothunder.com> wrote:

>> Er, yes. The only tutorial material I can find is about **writing** Externals,
>> something I wish to avoid like the plague. As before, I'm asking for pointers,
>> in this case to the implementation of a 'simple wrapper' in a Windows
>> environment. What I'm really trying to avoid is having to learn a new (well,
>> probably quite old) development environment and a new (to me) language - the
>> whole grammar of the API, at least. Maybe there are no short cuts, in which
>> case I will have to go back to school. But it seems hard, after all the
>> struggles I've had over the years to bootstrap my way out of low-level coding.
>> 
>> As ever, any suggestions gratefully received.
> 
> Graham, you can use a VBScript to do this... take a look at this tip on my
> site:
> 
> http://www.sonsothunder.com/devres/revolution/tips/ext002.htm

Thanks Ken, this looks really useful. There is a lot I can't follow at first reading, and I am working with a third-party DLL that has a very extensive API (more than 20 functions) but maybe that doesn't matter. I will make a big effort to understand what I have to do.

Also since writing my grumbles above I have found on the LC Resources site two lessons relating to externals (I think the first is by Trevor DeVore), but AFAICS they don't tackle the issue of how to get at the functions in the DLL itself, which you of course do.

In passing I would say I think it's odd that the information about how to incorporate and use third-party DLLs (the 'simple wrapper') is not part of the basic LC documentation, since a lot of functionality seems to be available off the shelf so to speak, but it's not much use if it takes days of research to incorporate it into the LC environment.

Thanks again

Graham




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