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.

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.

Quick PDF Library 7.13 is now available for download and purchase.

The new version primarily includes bug fixes and performance improvements that were reported on the QuickPDF.org forum over the past few years — as well as a number of new functions and official support for Delphi 2009.

What’s New

• Delphi 2009 support
• New functionality for GetAnnotStrProperty and GetAnnotIntProperty to handle GoToR and Launch annotations and speed improvements
• New EmbeddedFileCount function
• New GetEmbeddedFileStrProperty function
• New GetEmbeddedFileIntProperty function
• New GetEmbeddedFileContentToFile function
• New GetEmbeddedFileContentToString function
• New GetEmbeddedFileContentToStream function
• Improvements to internal outline navigation
• New GetNamedDestination function
• Internal support for name objects directly following the obj keyword
• Bug fix and improvements to encryption fingerprint functions
• Option to load images using GDI+ instead of internal image handling functions
• Support for type 3 functions
• Improvements to image decoding
• Support for inverted JPEG palettes
• Faster page location when page tree is a single array
• Support for loading 8-bit alpha mask from PNG images
• Better rendering of encrypted documents
• Support for alternate ICC based color space in renderer
• Support for W=4 in cross reference stream
• Speed improvements to object decoding
• Bug fix for text extraction with option 4 to return single words

Coming soon: 64-bit support

Behind the scenes we’ve been working on a solution for using Quick PDF Library in a 64-bit environment. We’re excited to say — and we know you will be too, since we’ve been receiving an increasing number of requests for such a solution. If you’re interested in doing some testing with this new version, email us at support@quickpdflibrary.com and we’ll happily send it to you.

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.

Upgrades

The upgrade to 7.13 is free for owners of a 7.x license. Owners of older licenses can purchase an upgrade to the new version for US$89.40.

Quick PDF Library Newsletter

If you want to keep up-to-date with all things related to Quick PDF Library, we suggest that you subscribe to our weekly Quick PDF Library Newsletter. In each weeks newsletter we try to keep our users informed about the libraries progress, as well as provide various PDF tips and tricks that can help everyone get the most out of the library.

Feedback!

As always, we’d like to hear from you. Feedback, good and bad, is always appreciated. So let us know what you think about Quick PDF Library.

Quick PDF Tools is a shell application for Windows Explorer that we built using Quick PDF Library and is available as a free download. Version 1.4 was released only a couple of weeks ago and the application has been installed almost 10,000 times in a very short space of time. The new features included in version 1.4 are: 

• PDF Preview — this amazing feature allows you right-click on a PDF document and view the first page, … instantly.
• Render PDF to image – creates a folder, and stores each PDF page as a JPEG
• Extract text – performs a simple extraction of the text in a PDF and stores in a .txt file
• Check for updates – performs a check with the Quick PDF Tools webserver, to advise the user if a new release is available.

Quick PDF Tools is just one small example of what is possible using Quick PDF Library.

After three months of round-the-clock development, we’re excited to announce that Quick PDF Library 7.12 has been released and is now available for download and purchase through our website.

During the development period for the 7.12 release we worked closely with our customer base to ensure that the new version of the PDF SDK would fully meet everyones expectations — and we’re happy to say, that based on feedback from a large number of users, version 7.12 has reached that point.

It’s ready for action.

What’s New

• Specifically targeted for ASP, C++, C#, Delphi, PowerBASIC, PowerBuilder and Visual Basic
• Save-to-stream and Load-from-stream support for web serving
• Advanced PDF rasterizer with RenderPageToDC and gradient support
• Advanced PDF page combining, cloning, extraction, imposition and merging technology
• Advanced PDF encryption, decryption (including 128-bit encryption) and digital signatures
• TrueType font support (including font embedding)
• Support for Japanese fonts and Turkish codepage (1254)
• Comprehensive form field and JavaScript support
• Built-in PDF barcode support
• Advanced drawing, including circles and arcs
• Rotated text, multi-line paragraph text, word-wrapped paragraph text
• Outline and hypertext functions
• Embedded image, file grouping and links
• Blazing performance increase and much more….

Upgrade Offer for Existing Customers

Existing customers are eligible for a 40% discount when purchasing the new version and can do so from this link.

Feedback, bugs, feature requests

As always, we want to hear your feedback, answer your questions, fix the bugs you report and find out what features you want added to the next version of our PDF library.

• General feedback
• Sales support
• Technical support
• Report a bug
• Request a new feature

What’s Next

The work doesn’t stop with the release of 7.12. That’s right, we’ve already begun working on version 7.13 and plan to release the first public beta for the next version in a few weeks time.

Stay tuned, there are more exciting Quick PDF Library announcements just around the corner.

For over 4 years a dedicated group of Quick PDF Library (formerly iSEDQuickPDF and QuickPDF) users have been supporting their fellow developers over at www.quickpdf.org, providing expert advice and help, and powering a fantastic user-to-user forum, which has helped literally thousands in need.

Since we announced our acquisition of Quick PDF Library a couple of months ago, many of you have contacted us wondering what sort of relationship we, as the new owners of the library, would have with the QuickPDF.org forum members.

Well, we have some good news.

Debenu and the QuickPDF.org founders are happy to announce that going forward, while development of the library will be handled by Debenu at www.quickpdflibrary.com, the www.quickpdf.org website will become the official user-to-user forum for Quick PDF Library.

This is exciting news for the future of Quick PDF Library because it ensures that the library’s users will continue to enjoy the benefits of a very strong user community.

Finally, a special thanks to Michel Korwin-Szymanowski and Ingo Schmöekel, as well as the other members of the QuickPDF.org forum who have worked extremely hard over the years to support their fellow users. 

Your efforts are greatly appreciated by everyone.

Note to Delphi users:

Thanks for your patience while waiting for the Delphi 2009 DCU files. We’re happy to announce that the D2009 DCU files are now available for testing, and providing there are no show-stopping issues uncovered in the testing period, will be included with the next official release of Quick PDF Library.

If you would like to test the Delphi 2009 DCU files, please send us an email at support@quickpdflibrary.com and we’ll happily provide them to you.