PDF overlay badly needed
I asked before, but I try again to push it 
Here in Italy we often have modules or forms from government (or tax office) that are provided in .PDF, and with fastreport I have to fill the empty fields from my accounting program.
Do do so, now I have to print the .pdf, feed the printer with the printed papers, and have fastreport to print just the fields in the correct position. Not good for my secretary. In addition, the correct filds positino is impossible to find at design time, so it's a "try and error" loop. And, to make things even worse, different printers have slighty different margins, so you have to print the pdf on the same printer you will use to fill it.
You can't convert PDF to a bitmap and put it as overlay since, to have a good 200-300 dpi resolution at A4 format, expecially if you print in color, there is a HUGE amount of data involved.
The perfect solution would be a overlay layer that can understand (and render) not only raster formats, but also the PDF one.
Any hope to see this implemented in the near future? BTW, I could donate some money (around 100 euros) for this, and if also other people are interested maybe, if it's just a matter of money, we could reach a significant amount to have Alexander devote some resource to it.
Thanks a lot
Marco Menardi
(my current setup is Delphi 6 pro, IBObjects, FastReport 2.54 and migrating to 3.x as soon as possible. So I need this just in 3.x).
BTW, I've posted this message in fast-reports.public.fastreport.3 at 14:30. Now it's 18:07 and doesn't yet appear... do I have to regiser somewhere to post in that newsgroup? thanks
Here in Italy we often have modules or forms from government (or tax office) that are provided in .PDF, and with fastreport I have to fill the empty fields from my accounting program.
Do do so, now I have to print the .pdf, feed the printer with the printed papers, and have fastreport to print just the fields in the correct position. Not good for my secretary. In addition, the correct filds positino is impossible to find at design time, so it's a "try and error" loop. And, to make things even worse, different printers have slighty different margins, so you have to print the pdf on the same printer you will use to fill it.
You can't convert PDF to a bitmap and put it as overlay since, to have a good 200-300 dpi resolution at A4 format, expecially if you print in color, there is a HUGE amount of data involved.
The perfect solution would be a overlay layer that can understand (and render) not only raster formats, but also the PDF one.
Any hope to see this implemented in the near future? BTW, I could donate some money (around 100 euros) for this, and if also other people are interested maybe, if it's just a matter of money, we could reach a significant amount to have Alexander devote some resource to it.
Thanks a lot
Marco Menardi
(my current setup is Delphi 6 pro, IBObjects, FastReport 2.54 and migrating to 3.x as soon as possible. So I need this just in 3.x).
BTW, I've posted this message in fast-reports.public.fastreport.3 at 14:30. Now it's 18:07 and doesn't yet appear... do I have to regiser somewhere to post in that newsgroup? thanks
Comments
make sure you set up your newsgroup account directly to newsgroups.fast-report.com not a general listing of newsgroups from an isp
I have the same problems with gov pdf's as you do, however the problems may lie in copyright infringement and licensing from adobe.
Thanks for your reply. You write:
"...however the problems may lie in copyright infringement and licensing from adobe". AFAIK, PDF is an open format, and you find a lot of Free Software documentation also in that format.
In addition, KPDF (for KDE) and other programs exist for rendering PDF files, so it should be not an issue.
And, if there is one, it's a patent one, not a copyright one, AFAIU. Since civilized countries have not (yet) sw patents, we could use that liberty to show the rest of the world how much sw patents hurt innovation
In addition, FastReports has a PDF export filter... so the know how, even if used in the "reverse/different direction" , should belong to Fastreport company.
regards
Marco Menardi
Any news here?
Regards,
Marc