For Immediate Release 9-17-99
WILTON, CT–Independent developer and MACTECH contributor Kas Thomas has
announced the availability of a free plug-in for BBEdit called PDF-Blit
1.0, which gives BBEdit users the ability to export their work in Adobe
Portable Document Format (PDF).
The freeware tool is available now at the following sites:
http://www.pdfzone.com/products/software/tool_PDFBlit.html
http://users.aol.com/acroforms/index.html
http://www.acroforms.com
“I was shocked when I announced the plug-in on a Thursday afternoon, and by
9:00 the next morning had served 24,000 page hits and 6,000 downloads of
the software,” Thomas noted after the plug-in’s September 16 introduction.
“I had no idea it would be this popular. It’s turning into a phenomenon.”
Thomas notes that he developed the plug-in in the process of writing an
article on PDF for an upcoming issue of MACTECH. The article will feature
source code for a skeleton version of the plug-in.
“I use BBEdit myself and wanted a tool for authoring PDF from within
BBEdit,” Thomas remarks. “PDF-Blit is what I came up with.”
“I call it PDF *Blit* because the plug-in will actually launch Acrobat
Reader for you and display your work in Reader when you invoke the plug-in.
You see your PDF doc in its final form immediately. It’s neat!”
PDF-Blit gives the BBEdit user control over a number of output options,
including margin sizes (on all 4 edges), typeface (12 fonts supported),
point size, leading, character width (condensed/expanded in 1% increments),
justification, auto page numbering, and the text that appears in up to 3
header lines on each page.
PDF-Blit also supports a limited HTML tag interpretation feature, whereby
the user can insert headings into his text with (H1) … (/H1) and similar
tags. Such styling tags as (B) for boldface and (I) for italics are also
supported, along with (PRE) for pre-formatted text. “For the first time,”
Thomas notes, “the BBEdit user can output richly formatted text, on a par
with high-end PDF authoring tools.”
PDF-Blit also supports a RECT tag for drawing filled rectangles (filled in
the current text color) in any x-y position in page space.
The complete package is available in a 100K StuffIt archive, free from
http://users.aol.com/acroforms/index.html.
Kas Thomas can be reached at kt@acroforms.com.