RE: DIY mark-up to PDF

I'm a firm believer in D.R.Y. but sometimes you have to do what you have to do. My understanding is that the rendering code hasn't been changed in forever, so hopefully new changes won't be an issue.



-----Original Message-----
From: Matt Olson [mailto:Matt.Olson@xxxxxxxx]
Sent: Monday, March 11, 2019 5:44 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: RE: DIY mark-up to PDF

Sounds like two different code bases doing the same process. Meaning double the maintenance. There are literally dozens of PDF librarys (many not requiring unmanaged code) that can do the job in .NET on windows. Not sure why you would want to reinvent the wheel here or why your current .NET program is using unmanaged code (perhaps .NET code from early 2,000's?).

For some of these tasks it's easier to just drop the data from RPG into an IFS file share to have a Windows program that has many more options available to it to periodically harvest.

Speaking of available options here is a list of ones I've used in the Windows world: Aspose PDF, PDFTron, Ghostscript, iTextSharp

Have not used these ones: Atalasoft's PDF Toolk, PSPDFKIT, PDFSharp, PDFClown, SharpPDF

I'd abort mission on anything RPG based, it's not where the future is headed. I'd suggest focusing on PDFTron and PSPDFKIT as they are doing some really interesting things such as native rendering and PDF manipulation in the browser using WebAssembly and operate on all major platforms today (Windows, Linux, Android, iOS).