[Info-vax] OpenVMS printing to PDF

[Dirk Munk]

Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> 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.
>

Seems to me as if we have a misunderstanding. I'm not suggesting using 
PDF as a way of interactive data entry, although that would be possible 
I guess.

With FMS you design a form, and that form has data fields. In your 
application you can fill those data fields with data from a database, 
and then issue a command to display the form. The application has no 
knowledge about the form itself, it just knows the names of the data fields.

Of course FMS also supports interactive data entry, but I'm not 
referring to that functionality, it's just about showing data.

If we could do the same thing with PDF, then you could design a PDF form 
with any tool you like, and then use a somewhat FMS-like utility to make 
the data fields in that form available to an application. The 
application can fill the data fields, and the issue a command to write 
the PDF page/file.