UPDATE: There is now a 64-bit compatible version of Quick PDF Library available as part of version 8. Read more here. Native 64-bit support is provided for the DLL, ActiveX and Delphi editions.

A native 64-bit solution is not yet available but Quick PDF Library can be successfully run on on 64-bit machines using WoW64.

Here is the relevant information on this issue for each edition:

• Delphi Edition — Delphi generates 32-bit code and so Windows will know to automatically run it through WoW64 on 64-bit machines.
• ActiveX Edition — if you’re using Visual Studio (or similar) you will need to set the platform target to x86 instead of Any CPU.
• DLL Edition — if you’re using Visual Studio (or similar) you will need to set the platform target to x86 instead of Any CPU.
• TCP Edition — this edition is designed to run as a service and will run successfully on 32-bit and 64-bit machines.

The basic steps required for configuring a project in Visual Studio to work on 64-bit machines with either the ActiveX or DLL editions are shown below.

In the future we will release a native 64-bit version of Quick PDF Library. The library is written using the Delphi programming language and at this stage, Embarcadero has not released a 64-bit compiler for Delphi — although it is on their roadmap and they’re working on it. As soon as Embarcadero release a public beta version of their Delphi 64-bit compiler we’ll get to work on building a 64-bit compatible version of Quick PDF Library.

Finally, if you would like to be notified by email when we release a native 64-bit version of the library please let us know by leaving a comment.

Exciting news for all of our C/C++ customers: we’ve just finished creating a statically linked version of Quick PDF Library.

The LIB Edition of Quick PDF Library is generated automatically by converting the DLL Edition into a static link library. The static link library file is called QuickPDFLIB0723.lib and a header file called QuickPDFLIB0723.h is included.

The new .LIB version will be included with the 7.23 release which will be made public very soon.

Make sure you read the getting started guide for the new .LIB version when you get it for some information on link dependencies and initializing/releasing the library.

It can be a little difficult at times to determine which fonts support the character set that you’re trying to use. One option is to manually use the Windows Character Map utility to check each font available on your system to see if it provides support for your language. The Character Map utility can be accessed from Start > Run > charmap.

An alternative method, and a much quicker one, is to use the GetInstalledFontsByCharset function, which we added in version 7.21. This function allows you to specify a charset (ANSI, Hangeul, Russian, Baltic, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, etc) and then to immediately see (via the string that is returned) a list of all the fonts installed on your machine which support the specified character set.

We’ve found it to be a very useful feature internally and we’re sure that you will too.

More and more PDF files are landing in our inbox that use JBIG2 image compression. We were not planning on adding support for JBIG2 until later in the year, but due to popular demand, we’ve decided to support it much sooner.

So the next version, 7.22, will support JBIG2 compression. We should have a beta ready in 1-2 weeks. Most of the development for this feature has been done and now we’re just testing and optimizing.

If you have any PDF files that use JBIG2 compression please send them to me at rowan.hanna@debenu.com and I will add them to our repository of testing files.

We’ve just added two new tutorials for using C# and Delphi with Quick PDF Library. The tutorials cover the basics of using Quick PDF Library in these programming environments and include a simple demonstration of the SDKs functionality.

1. Delphi and Quick PDF Library
2. C# and Quick PDF Library

There are also tutorials available for VB6 and VBScript.

If you would like to see beginner tutorials added for any other programming languages, please leave a comment and we’ll add it.

Quick tip: a useful tool for analyzing TIFF images is tiffinfo.exe. It’s part of the LibTIFF library and the Windows binaries for the tool are available from the GnuWin32 project. Once installed you can access the tiffinfo.exe command line tool from it’s default installation location:

C:\Program Files\GnuWin32\bin\tiffinfo.exe

And then use something like the below to run a test against one of your TIFF images.

tiffinfo -D “C:\Temp\example.tif”

The tool will attempt to read the data from the TIFF image and will report the image width, resolution, compression and so on, as well as any errors. The example below shows that the tiffinfo.exe tool picked up a problem with the TIFF image that was causing subsequent problems (after the image had been added to a PDF) in Adobe Reader 9:

Does anyone else have any useful tools for analyzing TIFF images or other image types?

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!