Re: Writing PDF files

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Bill Findlay" <yaldnif.w@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote in message 
news:CAC12F97.FDDC%yaldnif.w@blueyonder.co.uk...
>I am writing a KDF9 emulator in Ada 2005, and have reached the stage of
> simulating a graph-plotter device.  I'm hoping to do this by converting
> KDF9 plot commands into a PDF file, but am having difficulty finding a
> useful source of info on what a minimal PDF graphics file should contain.
>
> Is there a (preferably, simple) Ada library for this purpose, by any 
> chance?
>
> BTW I'm using MacOS X Lion.

When we had this requirement for the Ada Standard, I ended up choosing to 
create an RTF file (rather than DOC or attempt to create PDFs directly). 
Part of the reason for that was the lack of documentation of exactly what is 
in a PDF file (I think that is more available nowdays, back then Adobe was 
charging $$$ for that information), and another part is the embedded fonts 
in the PDF (very hard to emulate).

The RTFs our tool produces were designed for Microsoft Office 97 (and work 
reasonably well in Office 2003); they work in OpenOffice as well (but as 
might be expected, there are some formatting glitches -- and RM takes about 
an hour to open, compared to 30 seconds on Office).

The RTFs then go through an old version of Acrobat. (If I could get 
OpenOffice formatting to work consistently, I'd use it's built-in converter 
for that job.

RTF is relatively easy for a program to create (it is a plain text format), 
and Microsoft has extensive documentation on how it works. Or, you could 
just "borrow" part of the RM formatting tool (it will have a GPL license the 
next time it gets updated, which should be this week).

                                     Randy.