News Article

Saarbrücken RealObjects today announced the official release and immediate availability of PDFreactor 5.0, the newest iteration of its highly successful HTML to PDF conversion engine. PDFreactor 5.0 offers even more exciting and innovative features, paired with improved performance.

The new features include:

Sessions, request headers and cookies

It is possible to set arbitrary HTTP headers for all connections established by PDFreactor. A convenience method for setting cookies is also included. This enables you to, e.g. pass a session ID to PDFreactor.

Support for HTTP authentication

PDFreactor enables you to convert documents (incl. style sheets and images), which require a password for their HTTP connections. The supported authentication schemes are Basic and Digest.

Automatic font fall-back

If the specified or default font cannot display certain characters in the document, one or more fall-back fonts are automatically determined, i.e. PDFreactor will search the available fall-back fonts until one is found containing the glyph and will use that font for rendering the missing character. A list of preferred fall-back fonts can be specified via CSS or the API.

PDF overlay

PDFreactor can add content of an existing PDF file as the background or foreground for content being converted. This functionality also allows you to include watermark/confidential notes as a background or generate sophisticated form letters for mailings, publicity campaigns etc.

Enhanced PDF merging

PDFreactor is able to append any number of existing PDF documents in any order to your source document.

Multiple pages per sheet (n-up printing)

N-up printing enables you to place two or more pages on one sheet (physical page). So, you have the ability produce multi-page layouts or compact PDF documents, e.g. to implement a draft/economy print mode within your application.

Rearrange order of pages

Using this functionality you can modify the order in which the pages appear in the resulting PDF document. You can even repeat or remove pages.

Using the combination of the rearrange and multi-page features allows the implementation of complex business use cases, e.g. the creation of ready-to-print business card and booklet sheets.

Digital signature

PDFreactor allows you to digitally sign your PDFs with a X.509 certificate. The signature ensures that the document has been created by the author who is specified in the certificate. Moreover it ensures that the document has not been tampered with after its creation.

Improved shrink-to-fit

In order to avoid elements (e.g. text boxes or images) with fixed pixel widths (common on legacy web pages) exceeding the page size PDFreactor can automatically adjust the DPI value for pixels. Thus, everything will properly fit on the pages. It is also possible to manually specify the DPI value.

Improved layout and better performance

Due to partial reengineering we were able further increase PDFreactor’s layout capabilities and accuracy and at the same time also its performance, especially in terms of conversion speed.

Automatic detection of exceeding contents

In case an element (i.e. text or an image) exceeds a page or the border of a page content, an optional warning can be logged. Detailed information about those elements can also be retrieved programmatically. Thus, you will know whether the content fits without manually inspecting the entire resulting PDF. Retrieving the total number of pages is also possible.

For more information: http://www.realobjects.com/products/pdfreactor/overview/

About RealObjects

Headquartered in Saarbrücken, Germany, RealObjects is a manufacturer of standards-oriented, cross-platform software tools for content authoring and electronic publishing.

The company ranks as a pioneering developer of easy-to-use, affordable and quick-to-deploy online HTML editor solutions, which enable content authoring in Web- and Java-based applications. They are a perfect fit for Content Management, Knowledge Management and e-Learning systems. RealObjects W3C standards-based publishing solution PDFreactor is another industry-recognized flagship product, which is used for server-side conversion of HTML and XML to PDF whenever electronic and print output of business content in typset-quality is required. The latest RealObjects products emerged from Project MARTHA, an integrated application framework that enables enterprise developers to create powerful HTML and XML editing and rendering applications in pure Java.

Founded in May 2000, the privately held and self-funded software company has more than 2000 corporate customers in over 30 countries, ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 enterprises, educational institutions as well as government and non-profit organizations. A strong network of key business alliances, value added resellers and OEM partners has been established.