$Id: README,v 2.0 2005/11/16 02:16:00 areibens Exp $ ____ ____ _____ _ ____ ___ ____ | _ \| _ \| ___| _ _ / \ | _ \_ _| |___ \ | |_) | | | | |_ (_) (_) / _ \ | |_) | | __) | | __/| |_| | _| _ _ / ___ \| __/| | / __/ |_| |____/|_| (_) (_) /_/ \_\_| |___| |_____| There seem to be a growing plethora of Perl modules for creating and manipulating PDF files. This module is 'The Next Generation' of Text::PDF::API which initially provided a nice API around the Text::PDF::* modules created by Martin Hosken. FEATURES . Works with more than one PDF file open at once . It presents a object-oriented API to the user . Supports: the 14 base PDF Core Fonts, a subset of the base PDF CJK Fonts, a subset of the Microsoft Webfonts (not embedded), Adobe-Type1 Fonts in both ascii and binary format (.pfa/pfb), TrueType fonts (.ttf), OpenType Fonts with TrueType Outlines (.ttf), OpenType Fonts with Postscript Outlines (.otf) . Supports: "Joint Photographics Experts Group" images (.jpeg), "Portable Network Graphics" images (.png), "Graphics Interchange Format" images (.gif), "Tagged Image File Format" images (.tiff), "Portable AnyMap" images (.pbm/pgm/ppm) . Supports: "Electronic Article Numbering 13" barcodes (EAN13), "Code 3 of 9" barcodes (CODE39) with/without check-number, "Extended Code 3 of 9" barcodes (CODE39EXT) with/without check-number, "Code 2 of 5 Interleaved" barcodes (CODE25INT), "CODABAR" barcodes . Supports rudemantary modification of existing pdfs and imports from existing pdfs UN-FEATURES (which will one day be fixed) . Documentation is currently rather sparse . This is code in development which works for my apps, your milage may vary :) REQUIREMENTS This module set requires you to have installed the following other perl modules: Module Required for ------------------------------------------------------ Compress::Zlib - Compression of PDF object streams Memoize - part of perl 5.8+ now perl >= 5.8.0 NOTES For Type1 font support to work correctly you have to have a postscript font file, either binary (pfb) or ascii (pfa) format and an adobe font metrics file (afm). Thanks. CHANGES * between 0.3r77 and 0.40_13: put entire source under CVS. corrected licencing statements in all modules. requires at least 5.8.0 (5.8.1 would be better). rewrote entire module structure. rewrote importpage to use xobject rather than a true page, which is more reliable but discards annotations and acroforms. additional supported fonts: SynFont, CJKFont all fonts now use perl's 'Encode' modules wherever possible for full unicode support fixed imageformats: TIFF, GD, PNM, PNG additional supported imageformat: GIF supported bar-codes: 2 of 5 interleaved codabar UPC/Code128/EAN128 3 of 9/Code39 EAN13 barcodes are now full xobjects rather than copied page descriptions, which makes them more manageable. additional supported colorspaces: Indexed/ACTFile (adobe color table) Indexed/Hue (experimental; subject to change) Indexed/WebColor (experimental; subject to change) generic colorspace support has been dropped in favour of the new module structs. business-color support is disabled until rewritten. xobjects are now derived from page-content, so all drawing and text methods are also available there.