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!

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.

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!

OK, here’s something you probably weren’t expecting – over the past few months, we’ve been working on a version of Quick PDF Library that does a few things.

Firstly, it provides you with the ability to work with 64-bit applications in a native 64-bit environment, as well as the flexibility of accessing Quick PDF Library via TCP/IP from any computer within network reach.

This new edition of the library is now being distributed with the current version of Quick PDF Library. You’ll find all of the files necessary for the TCP/IP edition in the default installation directory (C:\Program Files\Quick PDF Library\TCP).

In this short tutorial, we’re going to show you how to get up and running with this exciting new edition.

Step 1. Install the Quick PDF Library TCP/IP service

Copy the files QuickPDFTCP0714.exe and QuickPDFTCP0714.ini to the folder containing your application (example: C:\QuickPDFLibrary\TCP\

Open a command line in administrator mode, run the following command to install the service “C:\QuickPDFLibrary\TCP\QuickPDFTCP0714.exe” /install

Step 2. Start the service

Edit the settings file QuickPDFTCP0714.ini modifying the IP address and port as you wish:

IPAddress=127.0.0.1
Port=10005

This allows you access the local host on your machine – you can also use this to communicate with machines across your network.

Run the following command to start the service:
net start QuickPDFTCPService0714

Step 3. A simple C# example

Create a simple C# application and add the QuickPDFTCP0714.cs to your project.

Add a single button to the default form, double click and add the following action:

private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
QuickPDFTCP0714.Client qp = new QuickPDFTCP0714.Client();
if (qp.Connect(“127.0.0.1″, 10005))
{
if (qp.UnlockKey(“YOUR KEY”) == 1)
{
qp.DrawText(100, 500, “Hello from C# via TCP/IP”);
qp.SaveToFile(“C:\\temp\\test.pdf”);
}
else
{
MessageBox.Show(“Could not unlock”);
}
}
}

Start the application, click the button, and then open an Explorer window and check the “c:\temp” folder. You should find a simple file, “test.pdf” with the “Hello from C# via TCP/IP” text in the middle.

How else can you use this?

• Provide your .NET managed code a way of accessing Quick PDF Library.
• Write 64-bit code targeting a 64-bit processor.
• Connect to Quick PDF Library servers across networks.

I’m sure you’ll find lots of interesting uses for this interface, please leave a comment to let me know and we’ll publish some of these stories on the site.

Note: The TCP/IP socket interface provides the “glue” for the 32-bit Quick PDF Library to talk directly with 32-bit and 64-bit builds, managed processes and also remote installations.

Customers often ask: does Quick PDF Library work with PHP? The answer is yes, and what’s more, it works very well with minimal setup required.

What does this mean? It means that you can use Quick PDF with PHP to build PDF web apps that do things like split and merging PDFs, modify security, etc, but also, it means you can add PDF functionality to your existing online apps. Do you want to generate PDF reports from a database on the fly and serve them up to customers through your website? No problem, Quick PDF Library can do that and much more. 

In this example I will show you how to use Quick PDF and PHP with a few simple steps. To demo the library I will be using the ActiveX version of Quick PDF Library and the version of PHP5 and Apache that is bundled with XAMPP. Of course, Quick PDF will also work with PHP and IIS, but I’ll leave that example for another day.

Steps to follow

1. Install XAMPP for Windows (alternatively you could install PHP and Apache separately if you wished).
2. Create a folder for your PHP project in c:\xampp\htdocs.
3. Download and install Quick PDF Library to a directory on your machine.
4. Locate the ActiveX edition (QuickPDFAX0713.dll) of Quick PDF Library and register it (regsvr32 <path>\QuickPDFAX0713.dll).
5. Create a PHP file and add it to your project in the htdocs folder (e.g. c:\xampp\htdocs\qpl\index.php).
6. Open the PHP file and add the following code and then save it.

<?php
$fileName = “DrawText.pdf”;
$qp = new COM(“QuickPDFAX0713.PDFLibrary”);
$validKey = $qp->UnlockKey(“…”);
if ($validKey == 1)
{
    echo “License validation successful!”;
    echo “<br />”;
    echo “Valid license key: “;
    echo $qp->LicenseInfo;
    echo “<br />”;
}
else
{
    echo “License validation failed!”;
    echo “<br /><br />”;
}
$qp->DrawText(100, 500, “Hello World!”);
$result = $qp->SaveToFile($fileName);
if ($result == 1)
{
    echo “File was successfully saved to disk.”;
    echo “<br /><br />”;
}
else
{
    echo “File could not be saved to disk.”;
    echo “<br /><br />”;
}
$qp = null;
?>

7. Execute the PHP file by loading it in your browser (e.g. http://localhost/qpl/index.php) and you’re done!

Some tips

// $qp = new COM(“QuickPDFAX0713.PDFLibrary”);

Call the Quick PDF Library COM object that you have previously registered. It shouldn’t matter where the QuickPDFAX0713.dll file is physically located, however, keeping it in the project folder will ensure that you don’t accidentally delete it. 

// $result = $qp->SaveToFile($fileName);

By default, when saving files to disk using the Apache service that accompanies XAMPP, the files that are created in this example will automatically be placed in the following directory: c:\xampp. Of course, it’s relatively easy to save the file in a different location with a small few adjustments to the PHP code, but I’ll leave that work for you.

The rest of this code should be quite easy to understand. But if you have any questions, leave a comment.

The example that I’ve used in this sample is quite simple, however, there’s no reason why it couldn’t be far more sophisticated. After all, with over 500 functions in the Quick PDF Library, you could build some pretty powerful PDF web apps.

There’s a lot of information about Quick PDF Library online, but it’s spread over a few different websites and at times, can be difficult to locate. Luckily, our good friend Google has the solution. Using Google’s Custom Search tool, we were able to create the Quick PDF Library Search Engine. This custom search engine only displays results from Quick PDF Library related websites, so finding what you’re looking for is now a whole lot easier.

Enjoy!

P.S. If you know of any other sites, or even specific threads on a forum, that you think should be added to the index, let us know by posting a comment.