Tim O'Sullivan's activePDF is one solution. If you're writing your applications with ASP scripting, you can use ActiveX objects to hide some of the complexity.
However, outputting anything more than the simple 'Hello World' document inĮxample 1 (see the box titled " Anatomy of a PDF File") can be a fairly complex task. The placement and use of the objects follow a regular pattern (seeįigure 1). Documents from ScratchĮach PDF file describes a series of hierarchical objects. I've also used PDFlib to generate PDF documents using Active Server Pages. I've found FDF, Adobe's Form Data Format tool, to be fairly straight-forward when used to create PDF-based forms. Fortunately, Adobe and other vendors have tools and resources available that let you create PDF documents or manipulate existing PDF files programmatically. It would be much more efficient to generate these 20 to 30 thousand documents dynamically from a template rather than rely on human authors.Īpplications that output information in the PDF format can be trickier to write than applications that output HTML information.
The documents I deal with are mostly sales visuals, and are PDF documents created by hand from various research and demographic databases. Online tax forms, such as those generated by TurboTax for the Web ( must be printed out in a way that does not modify the government-mandated formatting.Ī significant portion of my work involves document management systems. This is true, but there are also a significant number of cases where PDF documents are the best choice. The reason for this, it can be argued, is that PDF documents aren't practical in a number of cases. There are plenty of PDF documents on the Web, but only a small number of them are dynamically generated. It's somewhat surprising, though, that few Web applications output PDF files.
However, most people prefer PDF to Word for document display, because it's easier to create complex designs in PDF, and the format is portable across many platforms. The closest competitor, then, is the Microsoft Word document format. PDF files are often much larger than HTML files, and browsers must use the Adobe Acrobat plug-in to read them. This is mainly due to drawbacks with PDF technology. Rather than compete, PDF and HTML formats tend to coexist on the Web. For example, PDF documents appear in print just as they do on screen, whereas HTML documents come with no guarantees as to how they'll look when printed. The benefits of PDF over HTML include browser independence, increased security, and a much greater degree of control over the document's presentation to the end user. Although HTML may be a distant first, PDF is the de facto standard for Web documents that require precise layout and printing. Web Techniques: Serving Dynamic PDF FilesĬD Home < Web Techniques < 2000 < OctoberĪdobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) is the second most common document format on the Internet.
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