What's Cool?

ABCpdf gets up close and personal! Because it goes Direct to PDF™ it's incredibly fast. Because ABCpdf doesn't rely on any other software it can be completely multithreaded without any unpleasant bottlenecks.

ABCpdf is simple yet powerful. It's designed so you can get up to speed and productive within ten minutes. Yet if you want fine low-level control you can have that too with ABCpdf.

Create PDF documents from scratch or read and modify existing PDF documents. Add pages from other documents for seamless joining, insertion and stitching of multiple documents. Stream your documents direct to your client web browser without going via the disk. All up into the GB range and beyond.

Render your PDF documents in a variety of formats. Output your pages in raster formats like JPEG, GIF, TIFF, PSD or JPEG 2000 in any of a variety of color spaces and bit depths. Alternatively choose vector formats like EMF, EPS, XPS, SVG and SWF (Flash) for specialist areas such as high resolution print work. Control advanced rendering settings such as alpha, compression type, multiple pages and different horizontal and vertical resolutions.

Add virtually any graphic into your PDFs. ABCpdf supports JPEG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, PNG, PSD, PSB, EXIF, WMF, EMF, JPEG 2000, PS, EPS, XPS, WPF, SVG and SWF (Flash) amongst others. Additionally you can reference image data from multiple locations in your document - great for inserting watermarks and other frequently used graphics. ABCpdf is fully PostScript compatible.

Full support for the XML Paper Specification (XPS), Open XML Paper Specification (OXPS) and for Encapsulated PostScript (EPS). Microsoft XPS provides an alternative for page description and document storage but it is not compatible with the de-facto PDF standard. EPS is widely used in printing but often provides compatibility headaches when it comes to interoperability with PDF. ABCpdf supports full interoperability between Adobe PDF and Microsoft XPS and EPS. Convert your PDF documents to XPS or EPS. Convert your XPS or EPS documents to PDF. And our conversion routines are carefully written to preserve the natural structure of your source documents wherever possible. So this means the preservation of color spaces and the preservation or conversion of embedded fonts. Unless of course you want to change the format in which case you can render directly to Grayscale, RGB or CMYK EPS.

Output, validation and conversion to PDF/A standards. Conversion is made to work the way it should - it operates on practically all documents - even documents provided by third parties. A partner in this is transparency flattening which is a technology which allows you to remove transparency from your documents while leaving the vector nature of the format intact.

Full support for the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Microsoft WPF is the new graphics sub-system developed for .NET 3.0. It comes in both the standard flavor seen on platforms like Windows Vista and also in a lightweight web based system - Silverlight. Of course with a new graphics API drawing to screen a new PDF export facility is needed too. As such ABCpdf comes with full WPF import capability. See our WPFTable example project for details and examples.

Native support for Flash. Yes we wrote our own SWF rendering engine! That means that those lovely smooth graphs you see in Flash stay smooth and resolution independent when you import them into a PDF. And while we were about it we wrote our own Flash export engine so you can convert your PDF documents to native vector Flash.

Not only does ABCpdf support PDF, HTML and Rich Text Format (RTF) natively but it also supports a wide range of other document formats. Formats like Microsoft Word (.doc), Microsoft Excel (.xls), PowerPoint (.ppt), WordPerfect (.wpd), Lotus 1-2-3 (.wk1) and AutoCAD (.dxf). All you need to do is read them in! *

ABCpdf allows you precise control over the way that your text is laid out. Paragraph indent, kerning and tracking, word spacing, line spacing, paragraph spacing and horizontal justification are just some of the settings available. ABCpdf supports synthesized bold and italic typeface styles for situations in which you do not want to reference multiple typefaces.

ABCpdf supports Unicode and foreign languages. Reference fonts from the relevant foreign language pack or embed Unicode fonts for guaranteed fidelity of reproduction on any platform. Draw text horizontally or vertically and quickly subset large CJK fonts with minimal use of memory and impact on server load. Work with bidirectional script such as Hebrew and contextual ligatures in languages such as Arabic

Import HTML / CSS pages from local or remote web sites. Placed HTML support means your HTML can be treated just like any other media - placed wherever you like on the page. Paged HTML support allows you to flow your HTML from one area to another - across pages or columns or both. Select between the FireFox and Internet Explorer HTML rendering engines. A vast range of options gives you full control over the HTML rendering process and DOM.

HTML styled text allows easy creation and layout of multi-styled text; supporting text box chaining to allow you to easily and automatically flow text through from one area to another, around images and other irregular objects. More complex options like text on a curve or drop shadows are simple to implement using our example code.

Apply advanced transformations like rotation, magnification, skew and translation. This means you can draw rotated text, images and graphics all with only a few simple commands.

ABCpdf allows multiple different approaches to layout and document structure. The Table project shows how to use programmatic table based layout. The WPF Table project shows how to take WPF based content and convert it to PDF. The ABCpdf10.Drawing wrapper namespace exists for easy porting of System.Drawing code for PDF output. Or if you're more interested in XML to PDF or tagged PDF output there are the Tagged PDF Example projects.

ABCpdf supports sophisticated color spaces. Mix and match RGB, CMYK, Grayscale, Lab, calibrated color spaces and spot colors. Any kind of graphic from text to lines to blocks of color can be drawn in any of these color spaces. You can even perform complex operations like colorizing grayscale images using spot colors or converting from one color space to another.

ABCpdf supports direct import of ICC based RGB, CMYK and Lab images from TIFF, PSD and PSB. Full TIFF and PSD support for all color spaces, compression models and bit depths up to HDR (High-dynamic-range). This means you can produce high-quality, print-ready PDFs directly from your applications.

ABCpdf supports transparency everywhere. Any kind of graphic from text to lines to blocks of color can be drawn transparently using a simple alpha value to control levels of opacity. You can apply soft masks or chromakey style masks to images for selective transparency. Or you can draw transparent images such as GIF using simple calls.

Create encrypted or signed PDFs for secure storage of PDF documents. Apply user permissions and secure these permissions with encryption keys from 40 to 128 bits in size. Check signed documents for validity. Examine different revisions of documents to find changes between them. Revert back to any previously saved revision for comparison.

ABCpdf supports Fields and Forms. Use placeholder fields in your template documents to position and lay out dynamically created elements or assign field values directly. Stamp fields directly into the PDF to prevent them being modified. Create new annotations, anything from simple text fields through to multiple incrementally updated signatures. With advanced support for exotic types of field structure such as combs.

ABCpdf now supports conversion of PDF content into annotated SVG. This allows you to identify individual elements on a page and map them back to the operators in the original PDF file. So it lets you perform operations like search and replace on PDF text or identify individual images on a page.

PDF optimization and size reduction provides whole document optimization using a variety of options to reduce font sizes, remove embedded fonts, to resample and recompress images, to flatten wherever possible for the smallest possible output.

PDF analysis has been extended into easy-to-use operations for text and images. Simple on the surface but sophisticated underneath, they allow you to extract common-sense, de-hyphenated and de-ligatured text from PDFs. Then select items of that text within the PDF and perform operations on those selections.

PDF accessibility is now something that can be supported, even for PDFs which were never designed to do so. Standards such as PDF/UA and Section 508 compliance require that PDFs be accessible. Our accessibility operation performs a sophisticated semantic analysis of the document content and adds appropriate tagging information to produce an accessible Tagged PDF output.

Our ABCpdfView sample application now demonstrates this and a whole host of other ABCpdf features. It allows you to open, view and print PDF documents. It lets you edit text and text styles within the PDF. It allows you to insert, delete and re-order pages. It allows you to watermark documents. PDFView comes with full source code.

ABCpdf offers great control over images in PDFs. You can resize them using a variety of sophisticated and high quality resampling algorithms. You can assign new color spaces or convert them from one color space to another. You can compress them in CCITT, JPEG, Flate or JPEG 2000 format. You can resample them from one bit depth to another. Determine size, resolution and placements using sophisticated analysis operations.

ABCpdf is fully floating point for precise positioning of text, line and other objects at a fractional point level.

ABCpdf allows even more advanced control over any PDF object in your document. If you can't see how to accomplish a task using our simple to use methods then you can always access the raw PDF structure directly. This is true both for the structure of the document itself and also for any content streams held within that structure.

If you think there's something missing please do mail us.

* Requires helper applications such as WordGlue .NET, Microsoft Office or OpenOffice.org to be installed. WordGlue .NET is available on our site. OpenOffice.org is freely distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). For full details of the OpenOffice.org project see http://www.openoffice.org/.