Re: Quickreport to PDF: What is the best component?

From: Joe Griffin (JoeGriffin_at_nospam.cix.co.uk)
Date: 04/08/04 

Date: Thu, 08 Apr 2004 20:53:00 +0100

Tjipke A. van der Plaats wrote:
> We are looking at a way to allow our customers to make a PDF out of a
> (Quick)report. What components are there and which one do you
> recommend? It should have free deployment (no license fee for a user;
> only for a developer).

I've just been looking at this myself.

I initially used the PDF export filter which comes with QR Professional.
It was OK, but no more than that. All it output was the text - no lines,
frames or graphics.

I looked at what was available and settled for the LLion component.
llPDFLib from http://www.llion.net , which I bought through QBS Software
here in the UK (about $200 and no royalties). If you have QR
Professional, you can download replacement source files for QRPrntr.pas
and QuickRpt.pas from the QUSoft site.

This outputs EVERYTHING on the report, even custom components, with no
further work. With the modification I've made to the preview (see
below), I don't need to do any extra work to allow my users to get PDF
output. They simply do a "Save" from the preview (all my reports allow
viewing, printing or saving to a spread***). The only thing is that
this doesn't work for composite reports - they won't print from the
preview (a standard QR thing) - I had to add an option to save them
directly - trivial to implement.

I actually made a very small change to the QuickRpt.pas file (to allow
it to correctly handle the ReportTitle of Composite reports - the
released version does not pass the ReportTitle to the printer queue).

In addition, I made a number of changes to the QRPrev.pas file. This
adds the PDF file to the formats available when you click the "Save"
button in the Preview and makes it the default format, using the
ReportTitle as the default document name. If you do go for the LLion
solution, I'll be quite happy to pass you a copy of the changed QRPrev.

 ... Joe
Member of the UK Borland User Group