Quick PDF Library 7.19 has been released and is now ready for download from the updates page. The new version contains a number of significant performance improvements, new functions and much more.

The Quick PDF Library Demo has also been updated to work with version 7.19.

New Features and Improvements

• Improved object parsing speed and handling of malformed data
• DAAppendFile, DASaveAsFile and DASaveToStream functions now set the document’s modification date
• Added usage rights functionality to the AnalyseFile function
• New! RemoveEmbeddedFile function
• Added EMF+ output to the renderer
• New! AddLinkToLocalFile function
• Added support for image ICC profiles to the renderer
• New! RequestPrinterStatus function
• Bug fix for return value of DrawTableRows function
• New! SetCompatibility function
• Improvements to /ICCBased color spaces in the renderer
• Improvements to handling of buffer overruns in ASCII85 encoded data
• Added support for miter limit to the renderer
• Bug fix in decompressing flate data with a /Predictor value of 1
• Bug fix in TrueType parser with composite characters (alignment of diacritical marks)
• Optimizations to font handling in renderer and text extraction
• Improved handling of Type3 fonts
• Added support for handling of MMType1 fonts Optimizations to clipping paths in the renderer
• Speed optimizations in the renderer with improved stack system
• Improvements to the rendering of annotations with referenced resources
• Improved speed of loading objects from source PDF documents
• Improved speed of Type1 CFF conts Improvements to GetPageMode function
• New! RemoveGlobalJavaScript function
• New! SetEmbeddedFileStrProperty function
• Improved parsing of empty array and dictionary objects
• Improvements to accuracy of DrawTableRows
• Added support for arrays to CMap parsing
• Bug fix for rendering of large CCITT encoded images
• Optimized adding of certain PNG images to PDF documents
• Improved merging of documents with form fields
• New! GetImagePageCountFromString function
• Improvements to font substitution matching system in the renderer
• Bug fix handling certain inline images
• Improvements to adding EMF images to PDF documents
• DASaveAsFile function maintains the original PDF version settings
• Bug fix for underlines and highlights in center and right aligned text

Free Upgrade

Version 7.19 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.

Quick PDF Library 7.19 beta 8 has been released and is ready for testing. This beta version contains a number of significant performance improvements, new functions and much more.

The 7.19 beta 8 installer can be downloaded from the button below.

Release Notes

• Improved object parsing speed and handling of malformed data
• DAAppendFile, DASaveAsFile and DASaveToStream functions now set the document’s modification date
• Added usage rights functionality to the AnalyseFile function
• New! RemoveEmbeddedFile function
• Added EMF+ output to the renderer
• New! AddLinkToLocalFile function
• Added support for image ICC profiles to the renderer
• New! RequestPrinterStatus function
• Bug fix for return value of DrawTableRows function
• New! SetCompatibility function
• Improvements to /ICCBased color spaces in the renderer
• Improvements to handling of buffer overruns in ASCII85 encoded data
• Added support for miter limit to the renderer
• Bug fix in decompressing flate data with a /Predictor value of 1
• Bug fix in TrueType parser with composite characters (alignment of diacritical marks)
• Optimizations to font handling in renderer and text extraction
• Improved handling of Type3 fonts
• Added support for handling of MMType1 fonts Optimizations to clipping paths in the renderer
• Speed optimizations in the renderer with improved stack system
• Improvements to the rendering of annotations with referenced resources
• Improved speed of loading objects from source PDF documents
• Improved speed of Type1 CFF conts Improvements to GetPageMode function
• New! RemoveGlobalJavaScript function
• New! SetEmbeddedFileStrProperty function
• Improved parsing of empty array and dictionary objects
• Improvements to accuracy of DrawTableRows
• Added support for arrays to CMap parsing
• Bug fix for rendering of large CCITT encoded images
• Optimized adding of certain PNG images to PDF documents
• Improved merging of documents with form fields
• New! GetImagePageCountFromString function
• Improvements to font substitution matching system in the renderer
• Bug fix handling certain inline images
• Improvements to adding EMF images to PDF documents
• DASaveAsFile function maintains the original PDF version settings
• Bug fix for underlines and highlights in center and right aligned text

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.

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.

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!

Quick PDF Library 7.14 beta 2 has been released and is ready for testing. This new beta includes a number of new features and bug fixes.

The biggest new feature in this release is the ability to create tables in your PDFs — this will make generating PDF reports from databases using Quick PDF Library a lot easier. We’ve also included enhanced support for XFA PDF forms and will continue to make improvements in this area in the future.

Click on the button below to download the 7.14 beta 2 build:

List of changes

9 May 2009

• Added GetXFAFormFieldNames function
• Added GetXFAFormFieldName function
• Added GetXFAFormFieldCount function

10 May 2009

• Updated the docs for the XFA functions

13 May 2009

• Added GetFontObjectNumber function

15 May 2009

• Bug fix for fonts with /Differences array and no /ToUnicode entry
• Bug fix for non-embedded fonts with slightly different standard font names
• Bug fix for matching fonts characters with capital letters

21 May 2009

• New SetAdvancePassword function

22 May 2009

• Bug fix for saving PDFs that had an XRefStm – key now removed from trailer

23 May 2009

• Added CreateTable function
• Added SetTableColumnWidth function
• Added SetTableRowHeight function
• Added SetTableCellBorderColor function
• Added SetTableCellBorderColorCMYK function
• Added SetTableCellBorderWidth function
• Added SetTableCellBackgroundColor function
• Added SetTableCellBackgroundColorCMYK function
• Added SetTableCellPadding function
• Added SetTableCellAlignment function
• Added SetTableCellContent function
• Added SetTableCellTextColor function
• Added SetTableCellTextColorCMYK function
• Added SetTableCellTextSize function
• Added SetTableBorderColor function
• Added SetTableBorderColorCMYK function
• Added SetTableBorderWidth function
• Added MergeTableCells function
• Added DrawTableRows function
• Added GetTableLastDrawnRow function
• Added GetTableCellStrProperty function
• Added GetTableCellIntProperty function
• Added GetTableCellDblProperty function

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 we’ll get back to you asap.

Important – after May 31st, there’ll be a few changes with the Quick PDF Library licensing. We believe that the new structure will provide a fair match of price to value, and allow us to provide the best service possible to our customers.

The price of Quick PDF Library single-developer license will be increasing to $249 USD, however, we will also be introducing a not-for-profit and educational price at a discounted $149 USD.

At the same time, we will be creating a multi-developer license which will replace the 1-5, and 5-10 licenses. This new license will allow you to have as many people in your team (from a few to 10) work with Quick PDF Library at no extra cost.

The Delphi Source Code price will be dropping to $1299 USD – this gives those who want to get their hands dirty more of a chance to do so.

… And as per usual, all of our products are available at a 40% discount for previous owners.

Standard Support

All of our products come with free “best efforts” support as follows:

• 3 month upgrade insurance
• 48 hour email support M-F/fair use
• Minor upgrades free

Premium Support (+25%)

For an extra 25% on your purchase price, you can receive premium support which means you get:

• 12-24 hour email support M-F, fair use
• 12 month upgrade insurance (minor+major)
• Priority bug fixes

So let’s get it out of the way

We believe in considering the total cost of purchase … including support. At the revised pricing, we can ensure that we have the resources in place to make sure when you ask a question, we’re able to answer it in a timely fashion.

If you have any questions about upgrading please email our sales team at sales@quickpdflibrary.com.