Dreamscape - Makers of PDFReport

Easy To Use

PDFReport is very easy to use. It gives you a virtual PDF paper sheet on which you can write with very simple and intuitive commands like "ImportImage". If you need elaborated reports, you can iterate on every row of your database choosing the position of the text, the alignment, where to place logos, when to create a page break.

Almost all the commands are expressed on a unique unit of measure of your choice: millimeters, centimeters, inches, pdfunits (1/72 inches). It is very intuitive to recreate a form or an invoice, as you must only measure with a ruler the original paper and create a few lines of code - no calculations required!

Here it is a sample snippet of code, the classic "Hello World!" example:

Dim PDFRPT As New PDFDocument
PDFRPT.NewPDF "This is my first PDF"
PDFRPT.TextOut "Hello World!", 10, 10
PDFRPT.SavePDF "c:\provaocx.pdf"

EASY TO DEPLOY

PDFReport is very easy to deploy. It works with Microsoft .Net Framework 1.0 and 1.1, and it is a single, self contained DLL: as it doesn't rely on other libraries or runtime, the installation is just a matter of copying a DLL.

You don't even need to register it, just copy the DLL along with your program in the same directory and it works.

PDFReport is very stable, so it is unlikely that you have to change the DLL; should it happen, we try to keep the DLL methods stable so you can upgrade just by overwriting the old DLL, in 99% of the cases no re-registration is required.

".NET XCOPY TECHNOLOGY"

EMBED PDFREPORT FOR FREE IN YOUR APPLICATIONS !

PDFReport comprehends a runtime license so you can embed the component inside your applications without royalties of any kind - you can sell your products with PDF generation facilities from PDFReport.

The main limitation is obvious: you cannot use PDFReport inside a product whose main aim is to generate PDF, otherwise I would see tons of clones made incapsulating it in other dlls. Some examples of fair/unfair use:

Fair: accounting software like MS Money, with functions like generation of invoices in PDF, online creations of reports and invoices..

Unfair: Scan2PDF software, Tiff2PDF, "Whatever2PDF", printer drivers...

ROCK-SOLID PDF GENERATOR

When we developed PDFReport we took special care in the Quality Assurance. We test every single release by generating thousands of pdf files in the same process, to be confident it is reasonably free from problems and memory leaks. This is why many customers love ot use PDFReport when generating enormous quantities of PDF files like invoices, and why many customer have choosen PDFReport for use with their ASP servers!

Not only: we took special care so that even if you make a mistake in using the component: for example you may try to write a text to page 9, but there are only 7 pages; in this case PDFReport automatically uses the last page available instead of giving an Access Violation for having referenced a wrong page.

FAST AS THE LIGHT

PDFReport is REALLY fast and lightweight.

With PDFReport you can fully leverage old servers or old computers, with a few MB of RAM and old processors. Unlike other programs, it requires less then a couple of megabytes of HD, the size of the PDF you are generating in RAM, and any 486 or better processor.

In our test we were able to create thousands of files in a minute: it is faster than a printer driver of a factor of 20. Also, it scales better, unlike a simple printer driver, so you can use the processor fully and you can program without problems on a server process, like ASP pages (using a printer driver from ASP pages is, if not impossible, at least impractical).