Blog articles in category Tips and Tricks

Converting PDFs to bitmap PDFs

by Mike Bremford

There are many situations where a PDF has to be "rasterized" - the contents of each page turned into a bitmap image - such as when a PDF is being converted to PDF/A and the page contents cannot be repaired. This article shows how to do it efficiently.

Odds and Ends: PDF Valentines Cards

by Mike Bremford

This challenge was too good to resist. We've neglected to make our cards PDF/A compliant, which you are welcome to interpret as a commentary on the impermanence of romantic love, or perhaps it would have just taken longer to do. Either way we hope you had a happy Hallmark day. The code is below, and if you want to generate your own cards for someone you love (or even someone you don't) you ca...

Watermarking a Report

by Mike Bremford

The Report Generator is a layer on top of the PDF Library API which converts XML to PDF. The XML is much easier to work with, but there are always situations where you'll need the flexibility of the API. Here we show you how to do this, and we also present a neat and non-obvious technique for watermarking.

Combining Ant, Jar, Signatures and Pack200

by Mike Bremford

If you're deploying Java code as Applets, Pack 200 compression can reduce the size of your download by 70%. This article shows how to build digitally signed Jars with Pack 200 compression using Apache Ant. It can be applied to any code, not just BFO code.