One of the great things about FileMaker is its ability to not only create a PDF from a single “print job”, but to take a series of separate jobs and concatenate them into a PDF via the “Save Records As PDF [append]” feature, like so:
(The above code comes from PDF Catalog with Table of Contents, which appeared on this site last year.) Basically, anything you can print from FileMaker, you can instead output as a PDF.
But what if you have existing multipage PDFs stored in container fields, and want to combine them into a larger PDF? This is something FileMaker cannot do natively. Recently I had a need to do just this, and happened to mention it to Jon Rosen at ErgoSoma, who suggested I take a look at a cross-platform utility called PDFtk Server.
Continue reading “Extending FileMaker’s PDF capabilities with PDFtk Server”
Today we’re going to look at applying the virtual list technique to FileMaker charting with the goal of producing a reusable chart “object”, or rather, a series of chart objects. We’ll need more than one because while certain attributes (e.g., chart title) can be set programmatically, others, including type (e.g., column or line), must be hard-coded into the chart object.
