From: “Isamu Ohzawa” (io@fastio.com)
Subject: [ANN] ClibPDF – ANSI C Source Library for Direct PDF Generation
We, at FastIO Systems, are pleased to announce the availability of ClibPDF:
an ANSI C Source Library for Direct PDF Generation.
PDF (Portable Document Format) will be the native graphics format for the
upcoming MacOS X. While we wait for its arrival, you can start creating PDF
(Acrobat) files programatically using ClibPDF.
For details and downloading of ClibPDF, visit our web site,
http://www.fastio.com/
## What is ClibPDF
ClibPDF is a library of ANSI C functions, distributed in source form, for
creating PDF (Acrobat) files directly via C language programs without
relying on any Adobe Acrobat tools and related products. It is suitable for
fast dynamic PDF Web page generation in response to user input and
real-time data, and also for implementing publication-quality graph
plotting for both on-screen viewing and printing in any custom application.
Since there is minimal platform-specific code, it is ideal as
cross-platform graphing solutions with minimal developement efforts.
Generated PDF files are viewed and printed by auto-launching Adobe Acrobat
Reader or any other PDF viewer available free for many platforms. Note that
ClibPDF is for PDF file creation only. It has no support for reading or
editing existing PDF files.
## Notable Features of ClibPDF
– Most basic PDF drawing primitives are supported, plus arc and circle.
– Plot domains (linear, semi-log, log-log) with mesh to give graph
paper appearance.
– Axes (linear, log, date) with flexible tick marks, numbering, and
labelling.
– Markers, pointers, error bars for data points.
– Multi-page documents may be generated in any page order, and
pages may be written in an interleaved manner.
– Support for Flate/Zlib compression for fast web download
(No need for LZW license from Unisys.)
– In-memory PDF generation (no temp files).
– Transition, timed slide show support.
## Possible Applications
– Fast, light-weight CGI for dynamic PDF web pages generation.
– Report generation in medical, scientific, and industrial
test equipment (and plots may be used directly in publications).
– Giving legacy console-type applications an attractive
graphic output via auto-launched Arobat Reader (or any PDF viewer).
– Cross-platform graphing solutions.
– A unified imaging model for X-Window applications for beautiful
screen AND printed output (no more ugly screen dumps). This
eases the pain of the death of DPS (Display PostScript).
## License, Copying, and Distribution
ClibPDF is free OR commercial depending on how and by whom it is used.
ClibPDF is free for non-profit personal use, and use by educational,
non-profit, and government organizations.
Commercial license is required for use by for-profit entities (also refered
to as commercial users), including commercial web-site deployment
(including intranet), inclusion in in-house business, production,
manufacturing and research applications, for-profit use by individuals,
inclusion in commercial applications, libraries, and tools that are sold or
bundled with other commercial products. There is a special deferment
provision for shareware developers. An automatic free 30-day examination
period is granted for commercial users for the purpose of evaluting
ClibPDF.
The summary of license terms described above is an overview and is not
legally binding. Exact and legally accurate details of licensing terms are
described in the file LICENSE.txt or LICENSE.pdf included in the
distribution or at http://www.fastio.com/LICENSE.pdf.
We welcome feedback regarding the feature list, licensing, bugs, and
improvements and any other suggestions. Please send comments to
clibpdf@fastio.com.
## Platforms tested so far
— Unix variants —
BSDI BSD/OS 3.1 (gcc 2.7.2.1)
FreeBSD 2.2.7-STABLE (gcc 2.7.2.1)
Linux 2.0.34 (Red Hat 5.1) (gcc 2.7.2.3)
MacOS X Server (Rhapsody DR2)
NEXTSTEP 3.2, 3.3, OPENSTEP 4.2
SunOS 5.4 / (SUNWspro/SC4.0)
— PCs —
MacOS 8.1 (Metrowerks IDE 1.7.4) — See also: README.MacOS8
Windows NT 4.0 (VC++ 5.0) — See also: README.win32
## Relationships to other software
Conceptually, ClibPDF has been inspired by Cgraph for PostScript
(http://totoro.berkeley.edu/software/A_Cgraph.html), but it is much more
powerful and no code from Cgraph (PS) has been used.
Here are some comparisons with similar libraries. I don’t claim
completeness or impartiality obviously, but I try to be fair.
PDFlib: There are acutally two PDFlib’s, one from Thomas Merz, and the
other from Adobe.
NO part of ClibPDF is derived from or related to either of the two PDF
libraries. ClibPDF has been written completely independently. I have seen
some documentation for each, but no source code.
[1] Thomas Merz
http://www.muc.de/~tm/pdflib/
Thomas Merz’s PDFlib is also a source C language library for dynamic PDF
generation. There is some overlap in functionalities between PDFlib and
ClibPDF. PDFlib covers PDF generation at a basic operator level. It has no
compression yet, though the documentation notes that it is planned.
ClibPDF is designed to do much more than PDFlib, and it is primarily
targeted for graph plotting applications with high-level APIs for plot
domains, data markers, and log and linear axes, although it can be used for
any purpose. ClibPDF can generate multi-page documents in an arbitrary page
order. Flate/Zlib compression is supported.
[2] Adobe
http://beta1.adobe.com/ada/acrosdk/libraries.html Adobe PDF Library, I
believe, is distributed in binary form only with no sources (other than
header and examples), thus supported platforms are limited (in particular,
there is no support for Linux or FreeBSD). It may be used to write
applications that will create/read/edit PDF files. I have no idea how easy
it is to use.
[3] PDFPerl
http://www.ep.cs.nott.ac.uk/pdf-pl/
If you would rather use PERL scripts, this is for you. Due to the
interpreted nature of PERL, I think this is not going to be fast (I am
curious to see any comparisons).