[ANN] Release 9.0 DP 1

[Dr. Hawkins]

On Mon, Oct 24, 2016 at 7:59 AM, Bob Sneidar <bobsneidar at iotecdigital.com>
wrote:

> So you want to create the PDF from scratch? How about if you were able to
> create the PDF as a fillable form, then save it in a database so you could
> recreate it at will?
>

The last thing I want is a fillable form :)

I'm looking to take a (typically) government pdf, do all the processing to
figure out the correct info for it, and spit that out as a pdf.


> That is what my Forms Generator does. You can then fill it using either
> Applescript on a Mac, or else by creating the FDF xml file on either
> platform. If the latter, then the PDF has to be created to look for the FDF
> on startup. This method will work even if you are using Reader.
>

Anything dependent on a particular platform is a deal-breaker.  (But I
won't fight windows on a daily basis for development.  Nonetheless, my
Windows market is a couple to many times the size of my mac market . . .)

Using external scripting to fill it is another non-starter.

Simple version that I want:


   1. in advance, convert .pdf pages into .eps
   2. copy background image into work area
   3. put fields on top of this and fill from software
   4. save page as pdf


I can do this in livecode (or supercard, or hypercard) with .png and jpg.
On metacard on some unices, I could do it with a .eps, as I understand it,
and I'd be done.

But the simplest version with livecode that I'm seeing so far is


   1. pre-process pages of source .pdf into something that hopefully pdftk,
   pdftools, and a couple of others all understand
   2. also make a .png to use in development
   3. for each and every .png, figure out how much the offset misses by in
   livecode
   4. display the png in the background while working in livecode
   5. copy what I'm working with, delete .png, and export
   6. hand over control to script
   7. script steps through, page by page overlaying a page of my fields
   onto pages of pre-processed host .pdf
   8. return control
   9. hope scripts did it correctly.


Acrobat for Windows has a C and Java API for doing something similar, but
> it's my understanding that it is designed to work in a web environment, not
> as a standalone executable. I looked into it and determined it wouldn't
> work for me. All the sandboxing in place these days prevents it.
>

And all of these are far more work than having an environment that can
display a .eps as an object . . .


-- 
Dr. Richard E. Hawkins, Esq.
(702) 508-8462