[Info-vax] OpenVMS printing to PDF

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-05-19 23:23:48 +0000, Dirk Munk said:

> Indeed a PDF tool can do that. But think of a billing program that 
> produces PDF output files. Similar to FMS, you first produce a PDF form 
> with named fields, and then you fill those named fields in your 
> application. When the form has been completed you write the pdf form, 
> as an individual form, or all of them as one big file, just as you 
> choose.

So go write it, then.

With what I'm working with, you create the display as needed using the 
interface builder within the development tools, and then export the 
resulting display to PDF.   The applications don't know they're doing 
something any different than writing to a display.  That's with the 
baked-in PDF capabilities on the platform, and the related integration 
that's available.

For many applications rendering your pages via HTML5 would be a far 
more typical approach, then generating PDF files from that.

Related: 
<http://stackoverflow.com/questions/923885/capture-html-canvas-as-gif-jpg-png-pdf>, 
<http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/forms/html5forms/>, 
<https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/hh547102.aspx>, 
<http://diveintohtml5.info/forms.html>, 
<http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/466362/Blend-PDF-with-HTML>, etc.  
 Some of those links are comparatively ancient, too.

Rolling your own FMS or DECforms solution — unless you're doing 
translation or support or a conversion for existing OpenVMS sites, 
maybe — will have to compete with what's available, obviously.


-- 
Pure Personal Opinion | HoffmanLabs LLC