Generating PDF Directly from a Flex Application

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AlivePDFI want to give a huge shout out to Thibault Imbert because he’s created AlivePDF, a very powerful library that allows you to generate a PDF directly from Flex/ActionScript. It was a big part of my presentation at MAX and I think it deserves it’s own post.

In the past creating a PDF from Flex or Flash consisted of taking a Bitmap screenshot of the page/application and then turning that into a PDF. AlivePDF is much more powerful. Using his libraries you can actually create text elements, picture elements, etc and lay them out on the page exactly how you want. One of my (very simple) examples in the MAX preso is a drag and drop WYSIWYG interface for creating PDFs. We’ve got some great server-side PDF technology, but this is a cool library if you need to generate PDF on the client side. He also has a hook for AIR that allows you to save the PDF directly to the hard drive.

Also want to say thanks to Marc Hughes (grand prize MAX winner) for this post. It helped me get started with AlivePDF.

[tags]Flex, PDF, AIR, AlivePDF[/tags]

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  • http://blog.vixiom.com Alastair

    I’ve literally been waiting two years for something like this (I was hoping it would be part of AIR but this’ll work!)

  • Adam Rice

    Any info on whether or not this could be used in a Flex browser-based app (not AIR)? Based on the fact that Flex is restricted to the Flash Player sandbox, I assume this is not possible…

  • http://blog.ewherrmann.com ewH

    Thibault Imbert is also involved with the wiiflash project. He is one smart (and nice) guy. This is really cool, thanks for the post!

    Cheers,
    ewH

  • http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com Ryan Stewart

    Sorry for the late response. Adam, yeah, you can use it with regular Flex apps no problem. It’s just one flag change.

    I didn’t know that about Thibault Ed, that’s awesome!

  • Sudarshan

    Hi Ryan,

    Could you share the source code of flex WYSIWYG interface.