Suitability of Quick PDF Library for my needs

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   Hi, I am a fairly well seasoned Delphi Dev, but also spend a lot of time working for a few companies with general business processes etc.
So for one company we write the line of business financial system.  They produce letters and send them to clients and at some point I am sure we will want to have a workflow to PDF / encrypt / send / manage.  At this point we will want to seamlessly view /  search / extract content from PDF's and present in our app, either as it would appear on a page or in some kind of collapsed (multiple letters with the headers and footers cut out).  So we will be in the market for a tool / tools that assist with that.  I always thought that Gnostice was the defacto Delphi standard, but was pleased to see this product get a great review (linked in I think).  So tell me if this product isn't a good fit for this - we would need 2 licenses for 2 devs and it would be for about 35 employees as users.  So cost is an issue, but happy to pay if it ticks all our boxes and iis simple / robust / well supported as it will save us money in the long run.

Our problem today is that we have produced an editable PDF by:
- producing a "form" in word
- Saving as PDF
- Adding fields with Nitro PDF 9.
- It has a lot of fields - 219 I think over 12 pages.

All fine, but we have had feedback that in some cases all the fields don't appear, the same ones on Page 1.  I can reproduce in XP with Adobe reader 11.0.08.  I think this is the second time this has happened, i.e. on a previous form we pdf'd.
I just opened in Windows 8.1 with Adobe Reader 11.0.10 and it said it couldn't find Arial font (something for me to fix I guess).
So I re-visited my research on PDF toolkit to see if there is anything that may be documented about how PDFs' are put together.  I have posted on SpiceWorks and also raised with Nitro a while ago.  If I was as familiar with PDF's as I am with databases / Delphi generally - I might have an idea based on the symptoms.

So can anyone think of anything, maybe I can send you the form, maybe the tool / eval tool has a "map" of a pdf when you load it up?

Thanks for your time with this.  Sorry for being presumptuous as it is slightly off topic. 
Jason Chapman 

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jasonjac2 Members Profile Find Members Posts Beginner Joined: 03 Jan 15 Location: United Kingdom Status: Offline Points: 3	Post Options Post Reply Quote jasonjac2 Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Topic: Suitability of Quick PDF Library for my needs Posted: 03 Jan 15 at 6:40PM
	Hi, I am a fairly well seasoned Delphi Dev, but also spend a lot of time working for a few companies with general business processes etc. So for one company we write the line of business financial system. They produce letters and send them to clients and at some point I am sure we will want to have a workflow to PDF / encrypt / send / manage. At this point we will want to seamlessly view / search / extract content from PDF's and present in our app, either as it would appear on a page or in some kind of collapsed (multiple letters with the headers and footers cut out). So we will be in the market for a tool / tools that assist with that. I always thought that Gnostice was the defacto Delphi standard, but was pleased to see this product get a great review (linked in I think). So tell me if this product isn't a good fit for this - we would need 2 licenses for 2 devs and it would be for about 35 employees as users. So cost is an issue, but happy to pay if it ticks all our boxes and iis simple / robust / well supported as it will save us money in the long run. Our problem today is that we have produced an editable PDF by: - producing a "form" in word - Saving as PDF - Adding fields with Nitro PDF 9. - It has a lot of fields - 219 I think over 12 pages. All fine, but we have had feedback that in some cases all the fields don't appear, the same ones on Page 1. I can reproduce in XP with Adobe reader 11.0.08. I think this is the second time this has happened, i.e. on a previous form we pdf'd. I just opened in Windows 8.1 with Adobe Reader 11.0.10 and it said it couldn't find Arial font (something for me to fix I guess). So I re-visited my research on PDF toolkit to see if there is anything that may be documented about how PDFs' are put together. I have posted on SpiceWorks and also raised with Nitro a while ago. If I was as familiar with PDF's as I am with databases / Delphi generally - I might have an idea based on the symptoms. So can anyone think of anything, maybe I can send you the form, maybe the tool / eval tool has a "map" of a pdf when you load it up? Thanks for your time with this. Sorry for being presumptuous as it is slightly off topic. Jason Chapman

jasonjac2 Members Profile Find Members Posts Beginner Joined: 03 Jan 15 Location: United Kingdom Status: Offline Points: 3	Post Options Post Reply Quote jasonjac2 Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 03 Jan 15 at 6:42PM
	Just something to add. In my problem, if you tab around enough, the fields re-appear!

tfrost Members Profile Find Members Posts Senior Member Joined: 06 Sep 10 Location: UK Status: Offline Points: 437	Post Options Post Reply Quote tfrost Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 04 Jan 15 at 12:33PM
	The Debenu library definitely qualifies as a robust and well supported product. I have used it for your first task, to create documents, add fields, protect/sign PDFs, as well as to render PDFs to image. There is another Debenu library to help with creating a PDF viewer (which I have not used) but you can also render and display PDFs with the base library. Extracting text and searching is also possible, but there are other issues here that you have to consider. Firstly the obvious one of PDF text in an embedded image, which needs OCR to make extractable and searchable. Secondly the fact that a few PDF generation applications do not always place a paragraph or line of text in a continuous stream, so you may find only separately positioned pieces. I suggest you get the trial libraries and study and play with the application that runs examples of the various function groups. I cannot comment on what might be wrong with your PDFs or workflow; the internal layout of a PDF is reasonably well documented by Adobe, though significantly more complex than I care to learn about. View one with a hex viewer if you do not believe me. Better to start with a good library; then you can either ask here or raise a support issue with Debenu if you run into problems with it.

ozbobwa Members Profile Find Members Posts Beginner Joined: 13 Feb 15 Location: Perth Oz Status: Offline Points: 3	Post Options Post Reply Quote ozbobwa Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 26 Feb 15 at 5:17AM
	ABout the form fields sometimes not appearing I just read this: "If a PDF form doesn’t have appearance streams but the fields have values in them then the PrintDocument function will not print the field values. The UpdateAppearanceStreams function will need to be called before printing. See option 2 below for more details." from http://www.debenu.com/kb/appearance-streams-pdf-form-fields/

billegge Members Profile Find Members Posts Beginner Joined: 18 Jul 14 Status: Offline Points: 14	Post Options Post Reply Quote billegge Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 11 Nov 15 at 8:51PM
	I use CenoPDF ($59.95) for creating PDF documents in Word. CenoPDF installs itself into word (as well as in excel too) then provides an additional CenoPDF menu into the office ribbon, from there you have form components you can drop into your word document (they use absolute positioning though). There is a button that will create the PDF. This should save you some steps. http://www.lystech.com/