Any good PDF export filter that works with Fast Report?

Question

I recently discovered that PDF files exported by the Fast Reports PDF export filter do not display correctly on Mac OSX, iOS, and Android devices.

Fast Report said that their implementation in pdf format only supports Windows, and they cannot say when the new implementation they are working on will be implemented.

I also tried using the Gnostice export filter, but their demo installer did not work in Delphi XE, and when I contacted them, it took them 15 days to send me a connected dcus, which also did not work. Therefore, I am looking for another option.

If you know or use a PDF export filter that works with Fast Report, please let me know.

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November 2015: Fast Report now has PDF / A support . This option allows PDF files to work well on all platforms.

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October 2014 - Fast Report 5 still seems to be creating a Windows-only PDF. A ready-to-release solution for this problem will be an advantage for cross-platform developers, given that Fast Report is a report generator bundled with Delphi.

Here's a fresh example generated with a Fast Report 5 demo displayed using Adobe Reader 11 on Android 4.4:

And on Windows:

Answer 1

Gnostice support responded to my e-mail, which I reported that their trial installer did not work, and send me some tips on what might be the problem, and I was able to install it.

The company I work with has already acquired a license, and I have already replaced Fast Export Export Filter, which was as simple a task as removing two components in the same form as the frxReport object and setting 2 or 3 properties.

In addition, there were also 2 lines of code for exporting the report programmatically, and the information was easily found in their FAQ.

In the end, based on recommendations and searching for other options to find abandoned components that have not had any updates for many years, the best solution was Gnostice eDocEngine.

I just hope that they will make their installer a little more "programmer friendly", as if he complained about the lack of quick report blocks in the search path, I could at least have an idea of ​​what is happening, instead of just getting a message about error and blame them for not having a trial installer installed.

After replacing the filter and creating the PDF using the eDocEngine component, the PDF files now work the same on iOS, OSX and Android.

Answer 2

Fast Report said that their implementation in pdf format only supports Windows, and they cannot say when the new implementation they are working on will be implemented.

I’m not sure that this should be taken literally, given that the PDF file should be cross-platform. Rather, it means that they don’t actually have the time, equipment or experience to test with these platforms. The PDF export filter that I use is built-in to Fast Report! He probably has some errors, but I managed to get around them. And I think that might also work for you. Start with a simple document that exports correctly, start adding functions until it slows down, then you know what slows it down and you learn how to get around this problem.

From my experience, this is what put me in trouble:

• The rounded corners in the PDF did not look like in the Fast Report preview. My fix: found a combination of settings that made the exported PDF file look like a preview document. For me, the rounded corners were just a cosmetic feature, and with cosmetics there is no “One Look”; The alternative worked just fine. This can be fixed in the latest version, but I did not change the test document.
• Problems of transparency and general problems. When working with the quick report editor (and when viewing the preview), it is easy to overlap objects. You do not see this because of the opacity of the object. When exporting to PDF, overlapping objects somehow managed to “print” the outlines, and this obviously looked ugly. My fix: pay attention to these objects, make sure that they do not overlap, or make sure that they do not generate outlines if outlines should not be displayed.

Also make sure that you are testing ADOBE Reader on any of the platforms. If it works with an Adobe reader, but does not work with other readers, there may be a bug in the third-party reader!

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Edit: Here (link) there is an example PDF document created by my Fast Reports application. I have no idea what documents you create, but in my book this is a powerful complex document. Pay attention to the diagonal line that starts with where the table data ends; notice the embedded images (barcode, stamp, signature).

I opened this document on the following mobile devices:

• iOS iPad: The document displays 90% in order. Images are not displayed at all, but they are not important for my document (and this is most likely a problem with the iOS reader). All fancy color lines and rounded corners are properly displayed. Some text is not displayed properly, and I am sure that it did not appear because the “box” that contains it is too small for the content. This is most likely because I did not embed TTF fonts in the PDF, and the Apple font on iOS did not match the Microsoft font used on Windows.
• Samsung Galaxy S2 running Android 2.3: the document displays 100% correctly.
• Samsung Something (??), running Windows Mobile 6.5 and FoxReader: the document was completely gibberish: photos appeared, but the distance between the letters was so messy that it could not be read. I blame the reader, this is not an Acrobat, and he probably wanted to be "smart." And he broke his teeth in my text encoding, because my text is not English.

About PDF: A document is "PDF" if it is compliant with the standard, here is the Wikipedia information. Theoretically, a PDF document should look exactly like you are looking at it, but there are forces that can work against this:

• Not all readers are Adobe Acrobat. Theoretically, they are all compatible, in practice they are most of all 100% incompatible.
• PDF files that do not embed fonts depend on the fonts available on the host system. If they do not have the same fonts, then the problems lie ahead, because they can have slightly different sizes. Since we are talking about PDF files that were created on Windows and opened on iOS or Android, these are obviously different platforms and they are guaranteed to use different fonts (since the fonts are licensed and I doubt that Microsoft will license fonts for Apple. I I also doubt that Apple will want Microsoft fonts). One possible solution is to embed fonts, but this greatly increases your PDF files.

Answer 3

AFAIK, you can export quick report pages as metafiles (i.e., the Windows vector format, which is actually a raw serialization of GDI commands).

You can then display these metafiles in PDF format using our Open Source SynPDF library . It runs from Delphi 5 to XE, is ready for use in Unicode, can insert true-type fonts, and even create PDF / A files.

It can also export metafiles included in reports as vector images (rather than bitmaps), and therefore can significantly improve PDF quality and at the same time reduce its size.

See, for example, how it can be used for QuickReport . A similar technique should be used with Fast Report.

Answer 4

Here is my solution. It is not universal, but helped me in my case. The main idea: to use a report font with a small file size (I found the Arial font with a Cyrillic encoding of 57kb in size). Thus, exported files can be 100-200 kb. Details here: http://dev-doc.blogspot.com/2013/03/fastreport-4-font-reading-and-huge-file.html

Answer 5

I use wPDF from WPcubed components, this is a really great product, good value for money

Answer 6

You can always install one of the PDF printers. In fact, these are PDF converters that are installed as a window printer. They work from any application, including FastReprt components — just print on them.