PDF layer (Beta 1.0)

RReport provides a class called PDFLayer which can interface with several PDF libraries in order to export your report to PDF. The current implementation of the PDFLayer uses a slightly modified version of the library iText.

The library iText and the PDFLayer class for RReport are provided under the GNU LIBRARY GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE. A copy of the terms of licenses are included in the downloadble zip file.

Features

The following limitations must be taken into account when exporting to PDF using iText:

• The library requires jdk 1.2 or later.
• Images: the following images are not supported (according to the author of the library):
  • Gifs without a global colortable interlaced gifs
  • gifs using local color table.
  • JPG with of which the number of 'Bits Per Component' != 8
  • JPG with 'invalid JPEG markers' (see the code of class Jpeg)
  • PNGs with BitDepth == 16
  • PNGs with another colortype than 0, 2 or 3
  • interlaced PNGs
• Lines: dotted and dashed lines are not supported.

Download and installation

In order to install the library you must:

1. download the zip file here. The documentation of the library itself can be found here, however you will not need it unless you want to change the PDFLayer class.
2. unzip the downloaded file.
3. copy the file rpdf.zip to the same directory where you installed RReport.

Example

In order to export to PDF you must:

1. set the name of the file with RReport.setPDFFile() method
2. print or preview the report. The pdf file will be created at the same time you preview or print the report.
3. if you don't want to print nor preview the report, use the RReport.disablePrinting() method.

A complete example can be found in the examplePDFOrder.java included in the downloaded zip file. In order to run the example you must:

1. Copy the files: runExamplePDF.Bat and examplePDFOrder.class to the directory where RReport is installed.
2. execute runExamplePDF.Bat.
3. the file example.pdf will be created.

Changes to iText

The provided version of iText contains the following modifications:

• PdfDocument class: ability to print a table on specific absolute coordinates.
• PdfDocument class: deactivate the creation of new pages in the carriageReturn() function.