Quick PDF Library 7.18 has been officially released and is now ready for download from the updates page. The new version contains a number of significant additions and improvements to the library, including Delphi 2010 support, JPEG2000 / JPXDecode image support, enhanced unicode support and a whole lot more.

The full list of changes is listed below. As you can see, we’ve put a lot of work into version 7.18 over the past few months and we’re proud to make this our first official release of 2010. This is just the start of our exciting plans for 2010, so stay tuned…

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Quick PDF Library 7.18 beta 9 has been released and is ready for testing. This beta includes a number of exciting enhancements to the library — such as Delphi 2010 and JPEG2000/JPXDecode image support — as well as numerous bug fixes, improvements and new functions.

The 7.18 beta 9 installer can be downloaded from the button below.

Release Notes

• Delphi 2010 support
• JPEG2000/JPXDecode image support
• New! SetPageBox function
• Numerous bug fixes and improvements

Please note that this is only a snippet of the changes in 7.18. The complete list of changes will provided when the final version of 7.18 is released.

Feedback!

Any feedback large or small is appreciated. We’ll shortly be planning the next round of exciting new features for Quick PDF Library, so we’d really like to know what you want to see added to the SDK. Don’t be shy, email us at support@quickpdflibrary.com and have your say.

Quick PDF Library 7.17 has been released and is now ready for download from the updates page. The new version contains a number of significant improvements to unicode support, text extraction, EMF support and much more.

New Features and Improvements

• New GetDocumentFileName function
• Encrypted documents are no longer auto-decrypted in some circumstances (same behaviour as 7.15 and earlier)
• MergeStreams, MergeFiles and MergeFileList functions now merge bookmarks
• FlattenFormField function now works even if the form field does not have a /P (page) entry
• New tags to retrieve the following annotation properties:
  
  Subject (/Subj)
  In reply to (/IRT)
  Unicode filename (/UF)
  Page number of GoTo link

• PDFs with certain malformed stream objects can now be loaded (e.g. Microsoft Reporting Services PDFs)
• Improved text extraction using mode 0
• Improved accuracy and speed for PNG predictors in flate compressed images
• The following code pages are now supported in the AddTrueTypeFont function:
  
  874 THAI_CHARSET
  932 SHIFTJIS_CHARSET
  936 GB2312_CHARSET
  949 HANGEUL_CHARSET
  950 CHINESEBIG5_CHARSET
  1256 ARABIC_CHARSET
  1361 JOHAB_CHARSET

• Improved EMF import functionality
• Improved masked image processing speed
• Added support for malformed stream images with LF starting character
• Added support for optional content groups in the renderer
• XFA form field support now uses “MSXML2.DOMDocument” instead of “MSXML2.DOMDocument.4.0″
• The following functions have been Unicode enabled:
  
  DAGetInformation
  DASetInformation
  SetCustomInformation
  GetCustomInformation
  SetInformationGetInformation
  GetCatalogInformation
  SetCatalogInformation
  RetrieveCustomDataToString
  StoreCustomDataFromString
  GetAnalysisInfo
  NewOutline
  SetOutlineTitle
  OutlineTitle
  NewStaticOutline
  GetOutlineJavaScript
  SetOutlineJavaScript
  AddLinkToJavaScript
  FormFieldJavaScriptAction
  GetFormFieldJavaScript
  SetOpenActionJavaScript
  PageJavaScriptAction
  DocJavaScriptAction
  AddGlobalJavaScript
  GetGlobalJavaScript
  GlobalJavaScriptPackageName
  GetPageJavaScript
  AddPageLabels
  GetPageLabel
  NewOptionalContentGroup
  GetOptionalContentGroupName
  GetDocumentFileName
  DAExtractPageText
  GetPageText
  ExtractFilePageText
  GetAnnotStrProperty
  SetAnnotStrProperty
  

Free Upgrade

Version 7.17 is a minor update and therefore all existing version 7.x license owners are entitled to a free upgrade. Owners of older versions of Quick PDF Library can upgrade online here for $149.40.

Discuss The New Version

We’re proud of the community that has formed around Quick PDF Library, so we’d like to encourage new users to join in the fun and discuss the latest version of Quick PDF Library over at QuickPDF.org.

Updated 23/11/09 - version 1.5 of the Quick PDF Library Demo has been released. This new version has been updated to work with version 7.17 of the library and also includes a number of new scripts.

Evaluating PDF SDKs to find the one that’s right for you is a difficult process. Each SDK is unique and requires a certain amount of learning just in order to be able to get setup with it, never mind the effort required to actually find out if the component will meet all of your requirements.

Quick PDF Library Demo

That’s one of the reasons we’ve created a customizable demo application for Quick PDF Library. A demo application that shows you how to perform a wide range of different tasks — such as split pages by bookmarks, convert PDFs to images, extract text and much more — through customizable scripts.

Download the Quick PDF Library Demo

But to begin with, you don’t have to customize anything, you can just select one of the scripts and click on the Run button to see the library in action. No effort required. Then later, if you want to take the library for a spin, you can either customize an existing script or create a new script of your own and save it within the application for future use.

This demo is for new and existing customers alike. The default scripts provided demonstrate how to perform some of the most common PDF related tasks and will be updated frequently in the future with more useful scripts.

Keep in mind that this is only a beta release of the demo, so if you encounter any issues, please send us a message.

Enjoy!

A little while back we released version 7.15 of Quick PDF Library, which included an exciting new feature: support for creating and manipulating GeoPDF dictionaries.

For anyone who hasn’t come across the published GeoPDF extension to PDF before, it is used to present GIS and mapping data in a standard PDF.

The new GeoPDF related functions in Quick PDF Library are:

• AddLGIDictToPage
• GetPageLGIDictCount
• GetPageLGIDictContent
• DeletePageLGIDict

For some examples of GeoPDF enabled PDFs, check out the GeoPDF gallery.

The current version of Quick PDF Library isn’t fully compatible with Delphi 2010, however, we’re working on a new compatible version which should be ready by the end of the year.

Free Upgrade

The upgrade to the Delphi 2010 compatible version of our PDF SDK will be free for all owners of a version 7.x license. For any customers who purchase a full license or an upgrade for version 7.x now, you will also receive a free upgrade to the Delphi 2010 compatible version when it’s released.

Yes, it does.

A few of us here at Debenu have taken the plunge and replaced Windows Vista on our primary machines with Windows 7. Quick PDF Library works perfectly on this new OS — as we already knew from earlier testing — and the general experience with Windows 7 has been great so far. It gets a big thumbs up from us.

Quick PDF Library 7.16 has been released and is now ready for download from the updates page. The new version contains over twenty new functions, important bug fixes and a number of customer-requested feature enhancements, such as the ability to output PDFs as TIFFs and the ability to insert, append and count columns and rows in tables. Plus much more.

New Features and Improvements

• New! GetObjectCount function
• New! GetObjectCount function
• New! GetObjectSource function
• New! DAOpenFromStream function
• New! DASaveToStream function
• New! DAGetObjectCount function
• New! DAGetObjectSource function
• New! DAGetFormFieldCount function
• New! DAGetFormFieldValue function
• New! AppendTableRows function
• New! AppendTableColumns function
• New! InsertTableRows function
• New! InsertTableColumns function
• New! GetTableRowCount function
• New! GetTableColumnCount function
• New! AppendTableRows function
• New! AppendTableColumns function
• New! FontFamily function
• New! DeleteAnnotation function
• New! CloneOutlineAction function
• New! GetActionType function
• New! GetOutlineActionID function
• New! GetAnnotActionID function
• TIFF images optionally loaded using GDI+
• TIFF output added to renderer
• File names in link annotations (eg. AddLinkToFile) can now be Unicode (/UF key used in file spec dictionary)
• NewCustomPrinter bug fix
• HTML text font size bug fix
• Delphi 2009 string cast bug fix
• Fixed bug signing a PDF produced by Word 2007
• Fixed bug with RenderDocumentToFile page number substitution
• New pixel offset mode for rendering images to eliminate white lines
• C# DLL wrapper handles unicode filenames correctly
• Fixed memory leak bug: rendering documents with many large images
• Fixed memory leak bug in DLL allocation
• Bug fix for PDFs with comments in the cross reference stream
• Improvements to GetPageLGIDictContent
• Bug fix AddSubsettedFont
• AddToFileList now supports Unicode file names

Free Upgrade

Version 7.16 is a minor update and therefore all existing version 7.x license owners are entitled to a free upgrade. Owners of older versions of Quick PDF Library can upgrade online here for $149.40.

Discuss The New Version

We’re proud of the community that has formed around Quick PDF Library, so we’d like to encourage new users to join in the fun and discuss the latest version of Quick PDF Library over at QuickPDF.Porg.

P.S. In version 7.17 we’ll be introducing much improved support for EMF/WMF files. Stay tuned!

Why is a PDF SDK necessary? Why can’t I write the necessary code myself?

This isn’t a question we often get — generally speaking, if a developer has contacted us, it’s because they already know the answer. But it is a question that I quite frequently see on the developer Q & A site, StackOverflow.com.

Some programmers — and lets be fair, managers — are notorious for having a do-it-yourself attitude. This in itself isn’t a bad quality, in fact, in a lot of cases, it’s a great quality, but there are other times when it’s more of a hindrance than a benefit.

Lets look at adding PDF functionality to an application, as an example. PDF is an ISO standard and the PDF reference, which describes very aspect of the PDF format, is freely available online. Anyone can download the PDF reference, decipher it and then build their own PDF library to handle their PDF needs.

But most don’t.

The reason is pretty simple: the PDF specification is a large and complex document and it’s contents aren’t easily deciphered. Reading and understanding the entire PDF specification, or even more than just a small bit, takes more than a casual weekend — indeed it can take years to fully understand the full scope of the format. What’s more, not all PDFs are created in 100% accordance with the PDF specification. Due to the high number of PDF producers available, there is a lot of poorly constructed PDFs floating around — which you’ll have to account for if you’re creating a serious business application. And unfortunately, this is quite a time consuming task.

All of this means that unless your in the business of developing complete PDF solutions, it’s probably not worth your time or money to go it alone and develop an in-house solution, when you could simply purchase a third-party library for a few hundred dollars and save yourself hours, and hours, and hours of work.

你好

مرحبا

おはよう　ございます

привет

HALLÅ

हैलो

What have I written above you might be wondering? Well, I’ve tried* to write hello in a few different languages to highlight the new support for Unicode characters in filenames and paths — which was introduced with the release of version 7.15 of Quick PDF Library. The great news is that all of the above characters can now be properly handled in filenames and paths by all editions of our SDK.

There are many different ways to encode Unicode characters. One way is to use strings with 16-bit characters. COM/ActiveX uses 16-bit characters, so adding Unicode support for the ActiveX edition of the library was easy.

For the Delphi and DLL editions, the strings have always been 8-bit characters and unfortunately we can’t change the definition of functions to use strings with 16-bit characters as this would cause issues with backwards compatibility.

This means that when using the Delphi and DLL editions and working with Unicode characters, you need to encode your file names with UTF8 encoding, as mentioned in the function reference.

Different languages will have different functions to do the UTF8 encoding. For Delphi, the Utf8Encode function can be used, for example:

var
 FileNameW: WideString;
 FileNameA: AnsiString;
begin
 FileNameW := WideString('C:\unicode') + WideChar(20081) +
WideString('\test.pdf');
 FileNameA := Utf8Encode(FileNameW);
 QP.SaveToFile(FileNameA);
end;

That would save the file in the “C:\unicode乱\test.pdf” folder.

So far the response to the addition of this hotly demanded feature has been has been fantastic. If you have any other features that you really want to see added to Quick PDF Library in the not-to-distant future, visit our feedback page where you can suggest new features and vote on features that other customers have suggested.

* I hope I’ve written hello — if I’ve written something else, please let me know!