Any plans for importing pdf files?

[Jim Gold]

Do you have any plans for being able to import pdf files into vpe documents?

I would like to be able to take existing pdf documents and use BCB to fill in the blanks on them programatically and then export them to new pdf files. That way our users will have only one file format to deal with.

Alternatively, do you know of a program or module which will convert pdfs to bmps or jpgs so that I can do this in the background?

Thanks for any comments you can make on this subject, and thanks again for a great product even if it can't do everything everyone thinks of (like this)!

-- Jim Gold --

[IDEAL Software Support]

We have currently no plans to be able to import PDF files.

And unfortunately we don't know of a tool which will convert PDF's into bitmaps, but you might want to take a look at Xpdf - an open source tool - which can convert PDF files to PostScript. From there you can convert it into a bitmap using GhostScript. All these tool are free.

Regards
Thorsten Radde
IDEAL Software GmbH

[Jim Gold]

I just bought a copy of PDF2Image from verypdf.com which converts pdfs to bitmaps (TIF, TIFF, JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP, WMF, EMF, PCX, TGA, and others). It costs $59US, and has a free-trial version good for 50 uses (apparently 50 runs, since I converted over 50 pdfs in a batch on my second run and still had 48 runs left) but the trial version only converts the first page of multi-page pdfs.

Since the trial version saved me well over $59 in time, effort, and frustration, I bought the licensed one even though I probably could have gotten away with just using the trial version for all my immediate work: (50 trials) times (unlimited conversions) times (lots of computers) equals (never really having to buy the product).

They also sell a lot of other pdf applications which may be useful.

-- Jim Gold --