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 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.
