Generate PDF files

[baleyjk]

Is there any way to natively generate a PDF file on OpenVMS v8.4-2L1? I looked at Xpdf documentation but it appears to be a product to display PDFs on graphics terminals. What I'm looking for is to create a PDF within OpenVMS, even if a 3rd party product is involved.

If not, then what we plan to do is to drop files into a Windows directory from VMS then have a Windows app check the contents and convert text files into PDF using Windows application.

[sms]

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> Is there any way to natively generate a PDF file on OpenVMS v8.4-2L1?
> [...]

   "generate"?  Starting with what?

> [...] I looked at Xpdf documentation [...]

   How about Ghostscript (ps2pdf)?  I haven't looked lately at its
availability on VMS, but it has been available in the past.

   I'd also guess that DCPS could generate PostScript from something.

      https://vmssoftware.com/products/decprint-supervisor/

[tomwade]

Hi,

For converting text files to PDF, you could try text2pdf. A version for OpenVMS was posted by Craig some time ago in the thread referenced by
https://community.hpe.com/t5/Operating- ... -p/5527537

I used text2pdf for converting simple text files to PDF, and it seemed to work OK.

Tom Wade

[sms]

Code: Select all

> For converting text files to PDF, you could try text2pdf. [...]

   There's more than one program with that name.  I found one old
(1996), free version at:

      http://www.eprg.org/pdfcorner/text2pdf/text2pdf.c

   A modern compiler is happier, and the output more consistent, with a
couple of minor changes:

$ gdiff text2pdf.c_orig text2pdf.c_mod
38c38
< #define LINE_END '\015'  /* CR used in xref table */
---
> #define LINE_END '\012'  /* LF used in xref table */
65c65
< unsigned char buf[1024];
---
> char buf[1024];

   No bets on the quality of its output, but Preview on a Mac seemed to
tolerate the output from:

      pipe text2pdf -h | text2pdf > text2pdf.pdf

[brett.cameron]

The text2pdf utility is a good option for converting existing text files to PDF. If something a bit more dynamic is required, our Python distribution (see https://vmssoftware.com/products/python/) includes the open source ReportLab (see https://www.reportlab.com/opensource/), which could be an option, or if you need to do something programmatically from C code, then something like libharu (http://libharu.org/) could be an option.