NI-supported Direct to PDF Report LV Toolkit

[battler.]

Direct to PDF reporting is an extremely important feature to provide customers.  It cannot be relied upon that the customer has MS Word or the like installed.

There are a couple of LV PDF toolkits supplied by developers.  However, the problems with these include that they are (a) not updated or well-supported (b) buggy (c) have out-dated dependencies such as .Net 2.0 (d) restrictive licencing for deployment.

Good reporting tools are essential and NI should develop and support a direct to PDF toolkit.

[AristosQueue (NI)]

In the following, I am NOT speaking for NI. This is my opinion as a user of LabVIEW only.

This is the sort of library that I do not think NI should be building. Sun did not build every library for JAVA, and had they tried to do so, they would have been bleeding attention from their core focus on the language of JAVA and the features that directly supported their core business. NI tries to do this with things like the Database Toolkit, and those things inevitably starve when the core LabVIEW needs more software resources.

This is not meant to be a criticism of NI or our development practices. It is my observation about *any* business that tries to diversify too much, and although from one point of view this isn't diversification at all (it's just more software), from the point of view of the functionality supported, it is wildly outside of core focus. A library like this would have very marginal value to NI, and as such is as likely to go stale in our hands as in any lone wolf developer who threw some code up on the web and said, "Use this if you find it useful!"

I think what you need is to find a developer like Wirebird Labs or JKI who would look at such a library as a first-class part of their business strategy. I think the entire ecosystem for LabVIEW is stronger the more National Instruments stays focused on building a top-notch language, editor and compiler, leaving the libraries to third-parties except where those are directly related to the true core of NI which is hardware support. A PDF library doesn't fit the bill, in my opinion.

All of that is my point of view. Obviously if this gets high kudos it would be something that NI would evaluate. And even if it never gets high kudos, someone else at NI may read this idea and say, "You know, we should build one of those!" But I do not add my kudos to ideas like this specifically because I want to encourage NI to stay focused on the core.

[battler.]

A very important part of LV are the libraries.  As an engineer I do not have time to write critical libraries for PDF report generation or say for a zero-finding optimization algorithm.

NI keep the libraries coming!  The addition of libraries has no effect on the core other than the resources NI has to throw at it.

NI has made a business from the libraries and add-on toolkits such as report generation which we have paid for as part of DS.  Surely it was more difficult to implement and maintain the MS report generation toolkit than a direct to PDF report generation tool.

[tomlawton]

At the very least, publication-quality graph outputs would be nice!

I currently achieve this by creating and running gnuplot scripts from LabVIEW, which gives fabulous quality, but has required gradually assembling a library for the task; I'd love NI to take on that work..!!

And for reports, I create LaTeX documents from LabVIEW; again, great quality, but a lot of work on my part...

[battler.]

I don't like to bring it up but..

Matlab report generation toolkit has direct to PDF feature.

http://www.mathworks.com.au/products/ML_reportgenerator/description1.html

It is time that LV had this feature.

[AristosQueue (NI)]

> Surely it was more difficult to implement and maintain the

> MS report generation toolkit than a direct to PDF report generation tool.

I agree! Where we disagree is in thinkng that supporting the MS Report Generation toolkit is cheap! It isn't! It is extremely tempting to starve it of developer resources for a couple of releases in order to use those developers for something else. The LV team is smaller than you think, and leaving enough slack in a developer's schedule so they're available to fix bugs or update a toolkit like that is an expensive cost-benefit-analysis when compared to other things he/she could be working on that are closer to the core. Each one that we add is a greater diversification.

You cite PDF as a critical utility. How critical is it to NI's business over all? I believe minimal. I say that with fair certainty or we would almost certainly already have one or have one in development. It is a "nice to have", not a "need to have." I think you'd be better off finding a G tools vendor and pressuring them to make such a toolkit rather than pressuring NI to do it. To me -- as a user -- I think that strengthens the overall ecology and provides a better chance of having both LV itself and the desired library turn out as quality products.

NI will continue to provide libraries, but this is the kind that I don't think is sufficiently within our wheelhouse for us to own.

[AristosQueue (NI)]

tomlawton wrote:

> I'd love NI to take on that work..!!

I'd love for *someone* to take on that work. I don't think NI is the right place in the G ecology.

[Darren]

I think this is a duplicate of this idea, since the other idea's poster mentions the use case of having no additional software installed being a requirement. Do y'all agree that this is a duplicate?

[altenbach]

There are printer drivers available that allow printing to a pdf file from any app. (some come e.g. free with certain tax software)

The Chrome browser has print to pdf natively incorporated in their own print menu.

(Darren, yes this look like a duplicate of the other idea.)

[crossrulz]

I wouldn't say it is exactly a duplicate.  But close enough.  The other idea specifically says to add it to the Report Generation Toolkit, which is where I would think it would go anyways.

[donkdonk]

I think it would be very useful.

Something like "print to pdf" (without the need for a pdf printer to be installed in windows) would be a good start.

Especially printing-to-pdf without popping up menu's or "ok" buttons would be great.

(now you can save a front panel vi an invoke node to a jpg, html or rtf).