Hi Martin,

I coded ALL weekend on the VFP Rendering Engine inside of the Report Engine. Yesterday, I coded for 22.5 hours making for a very long day but it was also VERY PRODUCTIVE. In the sense that a lot of things that weren't working in the TRIAL DEMO and that were embarrasingly broken badly in the BETA are now working very well and also much faster. I will be posting an update in the next couple of days after I have more feedback from some current users who have been patiently waiting for quite a while as I rewrite and rewrite trying to get things perfected. Line stretching, text stretching, floating and Remove Line If Blank has all provided me with many thousands of hours of headaches that is for sure.

As far as PDF generation goes, there is no royalties required to Adobe that I have ever found. The PDF specification is published as an open document for others to follow, the same as BMP or PNG without needing to pay royalties unlike the UNISYS GIF/LZW licensing requirements. (The US Patent Expired recently and the patent expires in most other countries this year).

Did you realize that every VFP Developer according to UNISYS's website is actually supposed to obtain a license for the right to use GIF in a Microsoft Tool that supports GIF(LZW) encoding?

As far as the PDF internals of my Report Engine go, I have not made too many improvements upon it for a while other than optimizing images within the PDF document where if I find a duplicate, I create a reference to the original and only store it once. Instead, I have been working around the clock and writing and rewriting and rewriting again multiple times in order to create a very fast VFP Rendering Engine. My wife hasn't been very happy with the 100 to 140 hour work weeks. But it's for a good cause, because I wanted to have something better so I could programmatically modify the Reports on the fly at runtime.

As far as bundling PDF with VFP, MS could do that I'm sure, however, the output would still be limited to what the VFP RW output can do. Prior to the release of VFP 9, there was no support for rotated fonts on a VFP Report. This isn't difficult all that difficult to do in a PDF document. However, the VFP Team would have had to write a PDF driver. Not necessarily a generic Printer Driver, but a driver inside of VFP much the way that I have written a PDF Engine that doesn't require going through a printer driver. However, I have considered turning some of my code into a generic printer driver like several other 3rd party PDF printer drivers. Essentially, to write a PDF printer driver, is to get a handle to the windows spooler and read the Enhanced Metafile information in the spooler and output it to a PDF document.

But, there is a lot of work to supporting a lot of the PDF specs and writing a PDF Reader can even be more daunting. But could make a lot of people quite happy if they could read a PDF document into a much faster Previewing control and possible merge it with other data. <bg> PDF Form Filling might be cool to have as well.


I guess the main issue about this is that to be able to generate PDF you have to pay royalties to Adobe. I understand this is why there are no 100% free PDF tools. There are some free of charge, but which show you ads in turn. You have to have some business model to support the cost.

If I'm right, MS should raise the cost of VFP to include this feature. As an example, Crystal Reports allows you to generate PDF, but in this case, your distribution licenses increase.

Rich Simpson should know about that. May be he can crash into this thread.

And by the way, as Tore suggested, Rich's Preview Control is a great alternative to have OOP reports today, with LOTS of extra functionality.