PDF Library

Introduction
Motivation and Features
Framework Overview

Introduction

The PDF library framework, generates PDF documents directly from the ST/X system, without the use of any other software.
This can also be used as the basis of custom PDF applications. In addition, you can use this as a PDF printer plugin for existing programms, or to generate reports and documentation in a professional way.

Motivation and Features

This framework was written due to a need for PDF report generation in eXpecco. In a first try, puplic available java tools where used. Although these did generate acceptable PDF documents, all of the available tools were both very slow AND required huge amounts of memory (in addition to the need to provide and support an installable java runtime environment).

Advantages of the ST/X PDF library compared to other PDF generation schemes (based on java) are:

The PDF-generation is very fast!
Comparisons to other PDF systems (made via a simple text document):
- 10 times faster as XSL-FO (Apache) transformation
- 6 times faster as iText (JAVA PDF library)
Small memory footage
all of the Java solutions were not able to generate documents with thousands (not even hundreds) of pages without a need for huge amounts of memory. For example, the Java based report generator was not able to generate eXpecco test-reports with more than 50 pages. And even that required roughly half a gigabyte of memory.
The smalltalk PDF library does all this with almost no additional memory need.
Easy to expand existing features or add new customized features
Simple interface to plug into other Smalltalk components

Framework Overview

On the low level, you can control the layout and look of every individual character you write to the PDF document. The PDF library is able to parse and care for font metric information; thus allowing for proper adjustment of text and tables.
On a higher level, easy to use wrappers provide easy generation of Tables, Images etc.

Parameters which can be controlled are (among others):

color
bg color
underline
alignment
table colspan
border color
...many more...

Licensing

This addOn package is licensed separately from the base ST/X system.
Please contact eXept for further details, license information & pricing.

<info@exept.de>

Doc $Revision: 1.6 $ $Date: 2016/07/11 09:24:05 $

PDF Library

Contents

Introduction

Motivation and Features

Framework Overview

Licensing