PDFtoolkit VCL

Gnostice PDFtoolkit is a powerful component set for Borland® Delphi™ and Borland® C++Builder™ to manage, manipulate, view, print, enhance PDF documents and process PDF eForms.

PDFtoolkit supports viewing and printing, filling and reading of PDF forms, compressing, securing, appending and merging of multiple PDF documents, stamping, building Table of Contents, setting bookmarks, and many more functions that can be performed on PDF documents - without the use of any external PDF software such as Adobe® PDF library, Adobe Acrobat® Professional or Ghostscript!

NOTE: PDFtoolkit operates on existing PDF documents though it can create new ones by extracting pages from existing documents. To create new PDF documents, use our other products.

With the help of PDFtoolkit, powerful PDF document management functions can be performed by your business applications, making the applications more efficient.

Why use Gnostice PDFtoolkit?

• View and Print PDF documents from within your application.
• Convert PDF documents to JPEG, BMP, other image formats, and using eDocEngine, to HTML, RTF, TIFF and more.
• Modify and Re-organize PDF documents by adding new text, images, bookmarks and annotations, deleting pages, appending pages and more.
• Enhance PDF documents by activating links in content, inserting headers and footers, stamping page numbers, inserting document events and more.
• Automate reading of filled PDF forms and capture data accurately in the format you want, processing thousands of forms in seconds.
• Automate filling of PDF forms with constant data or unique data picked up from any data store, and distribute the filled forms in one go. An indispensable feature when you have to process and email thousands of forms to users across the globe.
• Stamps and Watermarks - apply markings that can appear on or below document content to indicate specific uses or restrictions on the document such as "Confidential", "Draft", etc or set the company logo as a watermark on all pages or selected pages of the document.
• Automate extraction of document metadata (or document information) and save it to a data store, enabling fast searching and retrieval based on document information elements. An extremely useful feature for implementing document archival/retrieval functions in your applications.
• Perform any kind of PDF document management, manipulation and reorganization task in batch or real-time from your application to automate document workflows.

Using PDFtoolkit to manage PDF documents from within your application

PDFtoolkit provides VCL components to link to the PDF documents that need to be managed. The developer can place the PDFDocument component on a Form or DataModule, set properties and then call methods to fill or read form values, compress, secure by setting password, append or merge multiple PDF documents, rubber stamp as ‘Confidential’, ‘Draft’, etc, add bookmarks and perform many more tasks related to PDF. The final output can be received in a memory stream or a disk file. The screen shot on the left shows how three existing PDF documents can be opened, merged, rubber stamped, secured with a password and saved to disk as one document. The screen shot on the right shows the new, merged PDF document.

Click to zoom		Click to zoom

Conveniently manage PDF documents with the extensive set of functions

PDFtoolkit supports a whole range of PDF document management and manipulation functions that enable a developer to implement all PDF management tasks right with in the application. Following is a partial list of the functions supported:

• Merge a list a PDF documents by just proving the names of the documents.
• Insert pages from one document to another by specifying a range of pages in the source document and the point at which the pages should be inserted in the destination document.
• Append pages to the end of one document by specifying a range of pages in the second document.
• Delete pages from a document by specifying a range of pages to delete.
• Extract pages from one document by specifying a range of pages to extract into the second document.

Once the operations are performed by calling any of the functions the document can be encrypted with owner and user password, and written to disk or memory in compressed or uncompressed form. Access permissions can also be set on the user password to allow or disallow printing, copying of text and graphics, modifying of document and so on. PDFtoolkit also handles encrypted PDF documents when appropriate passwords are provided; taking care to allow only the operations the user is permitted to perform. If the owner password is provided then all operations are allowed.

Process PDF forms (or AcroForms)

The form processing feature of PDFtoolkit enables filling and reading of form data from PDF forms or AcroForms. PDFtoolkit can be queried for a list of the form fields present in the supplied PDF document then values can be set for each field, accessing the field by name or index, and finally a new PDF document can be written out with all the fields filled in place! Field values from filled PDF forms can be extracted, again by just providing a source PDF document and a string list to store the read fields and values. The PDF field types currently supported are Button Fields [Checkboxes and Radio Buttons], Text Fields and Choice Fields.

Make PDF documents more interesting and easy to use

PDFtoolkit supports the association of pages with thumbnail images that users can easily relate to, just by specifying the page number and the image to associate the page with. PDF documents can be made easier to navigate and browse by adding new or editing existing bookmarks or Table of Contents elements. Physical markings can be underlaid or overlaid as watermarks or stampings to designate a document for specific uses and restrictions, such as “Draft” or “Confidential”. Markings can contain text or images, or both. You can even combine multiple underlay/overlay markings to create composite markings.