Is there any support for PDF in Free Pascal?
lazarus / 8-Other

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anyone · 2020-09-29 20:07

Hi all, I am new to this forum.

I wonder if it is worth to create a command-line utility txt2pdf... In
fact, I have already started working on it. So it would not make much
sense for me to continue working on it if Free Pascal already has
built-in support for PDF.

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Handoko · 2020-09-29 20:26

Maybe:
https://wiki.freepascal.org/PowerPDF
https://wiki.freepascal.org/fcl-pdf
https://wiki.freepascal.org/FPReport

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jwdietrich · 2020-09-29 20:59

You should also observe the licenses of the existing tools, which may
pose restrictions on the mode of distribution of your code.

Additionally, you might want to check out
https://foundation.freepascal.org/projects/project-6 and
https://foundation.freepascal.org/projects/reporting-engine for
information on projects currently being developed.

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anyone · 2020-09-29 21:50

Thank you, @Handoko and @jwdietrich.

"A reporting engine [with PDF support] that does not have GUI
dependencies" is something I was looking for.

Though, I just need to convert plain text file into PDF file. In the
mean time, I think I will just stick to my own txt2pdf by looking up
PDF File Format 1.7 Specification.

However, it is good to know that professional PDF libraries for Free
Pascal are available or going to be officially made available.

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trev · 2020-09-29 23:47

There is already a wide selection of text to PDF command line tools
for both Windows and UNIX or UNIX-like operating systems with source,
though they are generally written in C and have varying licences.

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anyone · 2020-09-30 08:50

Quote from: trev on September 30, 2020, 01:47:54 amThere is already a
wide selection of text to PDF command line tools for both Windows and
UNIX or UNIX-like operating systems with source, though they are
generally written in C and have varying licences.

Thanks for this useful information.  I hope I am not reinventing the
wheel because someone has already done it before.

I am not sure about those command-line tools written in C, but from my
initial finding, quite a number of open-source  software (regardless
of the platform) are using PdfBox (and its Android port), or iText.
Even my resume created with a mobile app was produced by iText (as
shown in metadata section).

It is not difficult just to convert plain text into PDF
programmatically after a few attempts (without using third-party
library) although it would be much complicated to generate multi-page
PDF (if input text file is long enough).