pdf report generation in labview?

[RayFarmer]

Hi,

One thing with PDF converters, If, for example, you have bookmarks in a Word documents, these will be lost when converting to a PDF version.

Therefore, with a report generator, you can added bookmarks.

But if you are not doing anything fancy, then its easier to just to use a PDF converter.

Regards

Ray Farmer

[Wiebe@CARYA]

You only have to rewrite your code if you have written code to begin with...


We thought about making a report generation toolkit plugin, so the report generation functions can be used to print a PDF. But this would invole changing standard LabVIEW VI's and enums. Perhaps the interface is even copyright protected. Also, the things the PDF format can do are very advanced compared to the HTML toolkit, and I didn't want this limitation. (If you can live with these limits, why pay for it if you have the HTML reports for free?)


I use a PDF printer myself to store word document in PDF files. I don't claim that this toolkit is a replacement for it. But if you want to make more advanced PDF files with LabVIEW, it is a good solution. If you only need a PDF with a front panel or two, I'd use CutePDF too.


As an example (perhaps I'm mistaken, I've never found a way to do this)... Printing to HTML has the disadvantage that you don't have any way to make new pages, or make footnotes, page numbering etc. The manual that's shipped with the PDF toolkit for LabVIEW was build with the toolkit. How would you do that with CutePDF Writer?


And yes, the PDF toolkit for LabVIEW only works in LabVIEW. As it turns out the Report generation functions also only work with LabVIEW, and (oh yeah I forgot), you also need cutePDF, and gostscript (and word or excel if you use that), and it only works on Windows. Compairing CutePDF with our toolkit isn't fair. CutePDF doesn't create reports. You still need a way to make them. So you have to compair the toolkit with the report generation functions in LabVIEW AND CuteFTP AND Gostscript.


The block diagrams of the 8.2 example VI are removed by mistake. This only happend with the 8.2 distibution. We will fix this soon. For now, you can use the example VI's from the 7.1 or 8.0 distibution. The professional version has password protected VI's (the free version has the diagrams removed), so upgrading to new LabVIEW versions is possible. If a paying customer has good reasons to see part of the code, we will probably cooperate. But we can't just hand out all the code. Just like you don't have the code for CutePDF...


Guess it's not up to us two anyway...


Regards,


Wiebe.

[Beri]

Hi all,

I put my question here to this thread, because I am looking for a solution for the following task:

at the moment we are creating a excel-based report using the Report generation toolkit, which works fine. But now the demand arises that we should save the report as pdf and not as excel-sheet. I see, that the ways which are introduced here (cutepdf etc) work fine, if you have a user there, who fills out the save-as-dialog. But what we need is an automatic version of this procedure. The application is some kind of data-logging and at the end of each run, a pdf should be generated. Is there a way to do this by using the existing report generation toolkit and one of the above mentioned prf-creators?

Thanks in advance

[mikeporter]

Yes, one of the inputs to the report generation VI that actually generates the output is the name of the printer to send it to. All you have to do is set that value to the name of your virtual printer (in my case the name is "PDFCreator").

Mike...

[Wiebe@CARYA]

This is exactly what the PDF Toolkit does.

Regards,

Wiebe.

[Beri]

@Mike: thats clear. First tests are done in that way that we use the PDF writer as printer of the "print report vi". But the problem is that all writers we had tested so far came up with a "save as dialog" or some kind of "user settings". This is no problem as long you have only a few pdfs to print or a user sitting there to fill in this pop-ups. But as we need a automated version, we are searching for a pdf-writer which can be configured via ini-file or whatever, so that we had no pop-ups.

at the moment we are testing BullZip PDF Printer (http://www.bullzip.com/products/pdf/info.php) which is free and it seems to be configurable. There is also a ActiveX-API but we are not able to get this working in LV via ActiveX calls.

[Wiebe@CARYA]

If you can create PDF files (regardless what PDF creator you use) you can use Acrobat Reader to print it. If you search the internet, you'll find out that it has command line options, that allow you to print to a specific printer.


Haven't tried it. It's also not supported nor officially documented. It might change in the future, but has been stable for many versions.


Regards,


Wiebe.

[mikeporter]

I just downloaded it and I agree with you it looks to be a very slick solution.

Mike...