[dba-Tech] Alternate PDF writing solution

Arthur Fuller artful at rogers.com
Sat Oct 16 10:51:43 CDT 2004


As some of you may know from previous messages, when the subject of PDF 
and Email came up, I recommended PDFMail, a class library from Attac 
Consulting. Recently I encountered significantly different behaviour 
when using Acrobat 6 as opposed to 5; which behaviour the client deems 
unacceptable. So I inquired about the costs of upgrading and was 
dismayed to learn that the Pro package I had bought for $199 now goes 
for > $500, and the upgrade is more than I paid in the first place.

So now I'm looking for an alternative. At a minimum, it must:
a) support creation of a PDF from any given Access report;
b) support, with a minimum of fuss, emaling said PDF to any specified 
recipient, and ideally setting up mail subject and body with a minimum 
of fuss;
c) support the merging or amalgamation of several reports into a single PDF.

Attac's PDFMail does all this, and works flawlessly with Acrobat 5, but 
without the upgrade there are issues if Acrobat 6 is installed rather 
than 5.

In case it helps, in the app of concern I print several documents -- an 
invoice, a hotel confirmation, a ticket to a party, etc. All these 
documents are based on the invoice selected when you hit PrintAndEmail. 
The reason we went PDF in the first place is that conversion to RTF etc. 
failed to reproduce the documents exactly as they were.

To phrase this last part in another way, PDF reproduces the color logos 
etc., which are a big part of the sizzle, flawlessly. But PDF itself is 
not a mandatory part of the spec -- flawless reproduction IS. If there 
is another way to go, I'm interested, the more so if this way is free or 
cheap. The client is extremely reluctant to spring the $500 + that Attac 
wants for the upgrade.

Any alternatives come to mind? I don't want to have to install 5 pieces 
of software on each client machine, nor cause the users to do anything 
more than click on one button. After that everything should simply "happen".

TIA,
Arthur



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