PDF Converter...

  • Thread starter Thread starter rmorvay
  • Start date Start date
RMorvay,

The use of PDF is a property from Adobe.

The have licenced that in much ways. (By instance do they give themself a
tool to read it and ever user of that is allowed to do that).

I think therefore that the website of Adobe is the first to start. (The have
a special developper section).

I hope this helps,

Cor
 
This is a copy from my reply to dchadha's recent post:

We recently did some research into this and found that there are only a
couple of ways to do it without dropping a ton of cash for an on-the-fly
converter:

1) Upload the file into a folder which a component has a "watch" on. When
the file is put there, component sees it and does a "print" to a PDF
conversion "printer" that puts it into a predefined directory
2) Send the "print" command to the "PDF printer" and allow it to place the
PDF where you have it configured

The problem we found with these is that you don't know when the PDF creation
is finished, and there's no way to definitively tell there was an error. Some
printers output error.pdf if it encounters one, but in a multi-user
environment, you don't known if that was your doc or somebody elses.

The solution we found that gave you an API to the PDF interface was over
$1700 and made by ActivePDF. if you have that kind of cash theirs looked like
the most comprehensive. or at least check out the options I outlined above,
also available from them.

There are very cost-effective ways to create a PDF on the fly, but none that
are easy for conversion purposes. I think ActivePDF has a creator that's only
like $30. So if you can take the content of your page and manually write that
to a PDF, you'll have it made pretty cheaply using any of the wide array of
creators that are out there.
 
Thanks. I have decided to leverage Adlib since it has a nice built in
converter that does not require me to install Office products or such. I
still have the same problem that you identified below but I am going to
"solve" it by creating a business tier component for conversion and
essentially determining the wait time for a normal conversion. I will use
the wait time for a normal conversion to then check the file system for the
converted document. If it doesn't exist I will go to sleep for 30 seconds
and try again. If it still doesn't exist, I will "assume" a failure and
throw an error. Not the most elegant but it should work. It would be nice
if I could figure out how to use a delegate callback with the Adlib Web
Service but I am not sure if that can be done.
 
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