Tag: PDF

Level: Intermediate, Version: FM 13 or later

PDF with Embedded Links

Kevin Frank

Author’s note: I’d like to offer a big thank you to Christian Schmitz of Monkeybread Software, not only for creating and continually improving a fantastic plug-in, but also for promptly and patiently answering my many questions.

A few weeks ago we looked at creating a table of contents for a PDF containing nine individual reports. The article ended by asking a somewhat rhetorical question…

Now that we have a table of contents for our master report, wouldn’t it be nice if we could hyperlink each TOC entry to its corresponding report within the PDF?

2017-02-10_180551

FileMaker doesn’t provide a built-in way to accomplish this, but it can be done using a combination of the MonkeyBread plug-in + DynaPDF Lite, and this will be explored in my next article.

…and today we’re going to dig into the nuts and bolts of what it takes to make this happen.

As usual, we have a demo file (Embedded PDF Links), but since it will only work for developers having licensed copies of the above-mentioned products, here is a PDF showing the end result: Report with Hyperlinked TOC.pdf

Continue reading “PDF with Embedded Links” →

Level: Advanced, Version: FM 13 or later, Virtual List

Virtual List Table Of Contents

Kevin Frank

A few years back I did an article on producing a PDF catalog + table of contents, with the TOC based on a vendor table and the catalog entries based on a products table. Today we’re going to use a different approach to generate a table of contents, building on techniques explored in last year’s Virtual List Reporting series… specifically we’re going to generate one big PDF combining nine reports, prefaced by a table of contents.

2017-01-30_173715

Demo files: virtual-list-toc-v1.zip and virtual-list-toc-v2.zip

2017-01-30_201617

Continue reading “Virtual List Table Of Contents” →

Level: Intermediate, Version: FM 12 or later

PDF Trickery

Kevin Frank

If you produce reports or other FileMaker output in PDF format, here’s a little trick that can be a real time saver in terms of development.

Imagine this: a client receives a nightly report via email in PDF format, and asks you to make sure it will fit on a single page in landscape orientation. The report always contains three groups of 12 records, with each group preceded by a leading subsummary, a latticework of horizontal and vertical gridlines, etc.

It is a busy, crowded report, but with patience and fine tuning, you manage to get everything to fit on a single page. Just. Barely.

Now the client wants you to add a trailing sub-summary to each group, but of course still expects everything to fit on a single page. The report is already at 8pt type, with tight vertical margins, and you are not looking forward to a bunch of time-consuming heroic measures to accommodate this request, so instead you employ the following trick. Continue reading “PDF Trickery” →

Level: Intermediate, Version: FM 14 or later

PDF Thumbnails in FileMaker 14

Kevin Frank

churchill-3“It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma but perhaps there is a key. The key is how you get the PDF into the container field, and which platform and FM version you use to accomplish this.” 

Winston Churchill, BBC radio address, 1939
(Just kidding about the second sentence.)

If you work with digital images, you’ve probably noticed the trend towards using PDFs as an image file format. I doubt many of use could have foreseen this happening when the PDF format was introduced in 1993, but in many organizations PDF has become the standard file format for images.

The good news is that the GetThumbnail function now works with PDFs in container fields in FileMaker 14, and in this article I’m going to suggest a couple reasons why you might find this useful, and explore some nuances between how PDFs in container fields behave on the Mac vs. on the PC.

pdf thumbnails demo

Today’s demo file, pdf thumbnails, is a 45Mb download, consisting of 32 PDF images (average size 160K, average dimensions 1160×880) as well as six stored PNG thumbnails of varying dimensions for each PDF. Continue reading “PDF Thumbnails in FileMaker 14” →

Level: Intermediate, Version: FM 12 or later

Extending FileMaker’s PDF capabilities with PDFtk Server

Kevin Frank

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:

7-13-2014 2-20-22 PM

(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.

7-15-2014 8-23-53 AM Continue reading “Extending FileMaker’s PDF capabilities with PDFtk Server” →

Level: Intermediate, Version: FM 12 or later

PDF Catalog with Table of Contents

Kevin Frank

Recently I was asked by a client whether we could produce a PDF catalog from his company’s database, with products grouped by manufacturer. Me: “Of course, this is FileMaker.” Him: “Can it have a table of contents?” Me: “Yeah, sure, no problem.”

Actually, it took some trial and error, but we got there eventually…

7-13-2013 4-36-23 PM

Continue reading “PDF Catalog with Table of Contents” →