ABCpdf

ABCpdf is a popular development library for creating and manipulating Adobe PDF documents. Designed for the Microsoft .NET Framework and ASP, this component also includes a virtualised COM interface for backward compatibility and interopability. The product documentation contains code examples written in and Visual Basic .NET for each major function of the library. The installation is accompanied by several example projects which may be freely adapted to suite any purpose. The library is actively developed, with each new release maintaining compliance with the most recent PDF reference.
Example Code
C Sharp
<source lang="csharp">
Doc theDoc = new Doc();
theDoc.FontSize = 96;
theDoc.AddText("Hello World");
theDoc.Save(Server.MapPath("simple.pdf"));
theDoc.Clear();
</source>
Visual Basic .NET
<source lang="vbnet">
Dim theDoc As Doc = New Doc()
theDoc.FontSize = 96
theDoc.AddText("Hello World")
theDoc.Save(Server.MapPath("simple.pdf"))
theDoc.Clear()
</source>
Localization
ABCpdf supports Unicode and foreign languages, including bi-directional text such as Arabic and Hebrew, and double-byte character sets such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK).
Color Management
ABCpdf supports ICC profiles, transparencies, color spaces such as CMYK, RGB, greyscale, 1-bit black & white, and spot colors.
Format Support
Format support includes BMP, DOC, DXF, EMF, EPS, GIF, HTML, JBIG, JPEG, JPEG 2000, MHT, PDF, PNG, PostScript, PPT, RTF, Tiny SVG, SWF, TIFF, WMF, WPD, WPF, XIF, XLS, XPS.
Licensing
ABCpdf is proprietory software and the webSupergoo licenses vary depending on the version installed. A typical license agreement is published on their web site. Specific license agreements are located under the menu item of each installed product.
History
The first public release of ABCpdf was on . Developed by webSupergoo Software, a company specializing in imaging and internet technologies, ABCpdf was origninally designed for demanding multi-threaded web server environments. ABCpdf offered a powerful way to directly generate PDF documents on the fly, without dependencies on printer drivers or other software.
ABCpdf version 2, released , introduced support for embedded or referenced TrueType fonts. New text settings provided control over paragraphs, lines, words and character spacing. Support for common graphic file formats was extended. Read access to low-level document structure was provided.
ABCpdf version 3, released , introduced HTML styled text and the ability to import HTML documents from local or remote sources. Unicode and foreign language support was extended, sub setting for CJK fonts, and synthesized bold and italic were added. Low-level write access to the raw PDF structure was enhanced. Object positioning improved by fully implementing floating point precision.
ABCpdf version 4, released , featured many improvements to color space handling, such as transparency support for soft masks and chromakey style masks, and direct import of ICC based RGB, CMYK and LAB images. Acrobat 6 compliant, this version included support for the Object Stream compression methods introduced with PDF 1.5. eForms and Fields support was enhanced, and took advantage of the rich text fields introduced as part of PDF 1.5. The co-ordinate system was revised to enable relocation of the origin and alternative units of measurement. The .NET version of ABCpdf included an 'Objects' and 'Atoms' namespaces to provide further access to PDF atomic data structures.
ABCpdf version 5, released , introduced linearized PDF documents (fast web view) as standard, and was fully Acrobat 7 compliant. HTML / CSS support was enhanced, and elements such as links, forms and movies became 'live'. eForms were further improved, and a stamping feature added. Page re-ordering, copying and deletion was enhanced though a new 'RemapPages' method. New bookmarking / outline functions were added. New drawing functions and an advanced drawing example using low level PDF operators were also added. The table class example was expanded to include nestable tables. An ABCpdf Professional version introduced page rendering to screen or printer.
ABCpdf version 6, released , introduced new HTML styled text options for greater control over the addition of text, and support for complex scripts and unusual glyphs was enhanced. Conversion of PDF content into annotated SVG enabled individual page elements to be identified more readily. Support for Postscript and EPS was improved, enabling direct import and export. Further enhancements to graphic file format support included EMF compatibility, JPEG200 support, and LZW and flate support for TIFF images. The .NET version of ABCpdf contained additional features. This included the ability to import Microsoft Office files, other word processing formats such as WordPerfect, and AutoCad files (DXF). Support for embedding Flash charts and movie previews was added. HTML documents compiled to MHT could be imported. Color space conversion and sophisticated resampling algorithms for raster images introduced. An ABCpdf6.Drawing wrapper namespace was added to enable easy porting of System.Drawing code. An example application was added, PDFView, along with the full source code.
ABCpdf version 7, released , unified the ASP and .NET versions into a single product by providing a COM layer over the native .NET base. This provided advantages such as native x64 architecture support and features otherwise unavailable to users of the ASP version. Version 7 is fully compliant with PDF 1.8 / Acrobat 9.0. Full support for the XML Paper Specification (XPS) was introduced, enabling conversion between the two competing formats. When installed on systems running .NET Framework 3.0, ABCpdf dynamically links into the frameworks library to enable support for Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight, without affecting older systems restricted to running .NET Framework 2.0. The EPS import engine was rewritten to provide a direct translation between EPS and PDF wherever possible. An SWF rendering engine was added to enhance the import and export of native vector Flash data. Changes to document structure are preserved by incremental updates, offering the ability to record changes and append sequences of signatures. eForm and Annotation support enhanced. Fixes corrupt and non-standard formats created by new updates of popular software.

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