pdf report generation in labview?

[Erik_1]

I'm trying to generate a pdf test report that will contain plots of data and other information input by the user (their name, serial numbers, etc.). The built in html report generation functionality seems to be more trouble than it's worth - I'm not looking to make a simple test report (I'm trying to format it in a rather complex way). I know I can easily convert the html file to a pdf file after the fact but it would be incredibly useful if there was a way to generate (and format) the pdf file directly in labview. Does anyone know anything about this?
 
Despite these limitations, I currently have it set up to generate an html file and I've found that it's easier to insert strings of html syntax (using the append text to report icon) than use most of the built in icons. The report it's generating is not what I'm looking for...
 
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
 
-Erik

[Beri]

Hi all,
 
I put my question here to this thread, because I am looking for a solution for the following task:
 
at the moment we are creating a excel-based report using the Report generation toolkit, which works fine. But now the demand arises that we should save the report as pdf and not as excel-sheet. I see, that the ways which are introduced here (cutepdf etc) work fine, if you have a user there, who fills out the save-as-dialog. But what we need is an automatic version of this procedure. The application is some kind of data-logging and at the end of each run, a pdf should be generated. Is there a way to do this by using the existing report generation toolkit and one of the above mentioned prf-creators?
 
Thanks in advance

[Wiebe@CARYA]

This is exactly what the PDF Toolkit does.

 

Regards,

 

Wiebe.

[Beri]

@Mike: thats clear. First tests are done in that way that we use the PDF writer as printer of the "print report vi". But the problem is that all writers we had tested so far came up with a "save as dialog" or some kind of "user settings". This is no problem as long you have only a few pdfs to print or a user sitting there to fill in this pop-ups. But as we need a automated version, we are searching for a pdf-writer which can be configured via ini-file or whatever, so that we had no pop-ups.
 
at the moment we are testing BullZip PDF Printer (<a href="http://www.bullzip.com/products/pdf/info.php" target="_blank">http://www.bullzip.com/products/pdf/info.php</a>) which is free and it seems to be configurable. There is also a ActiveX-API but we are not able to get this working in LV via ActiveX calls.

[Wiebe@CARYA]

If you can create PDF files (regardless what PDF creator you use) you can use Acrobat Reader to print it. If you search the internet, you'll find out that it has command line options, that allow you to print to a specific printer.

 

Haven't tried it. It's also not supported nor officially documented. It might change in the future, but has been stable for many versions.

 

Regards,

 

Wiebe.