Shame on Adobe for PDF support in CF
We have a system that has to produce fairly complex personalized documents as output. We produce these as HTML, with the help of CFML of course. We found however that printing these direct could not really be handled by the combination of browser and printer especially as we had different paper sizes and printers to deal with. So we decided to convert the output to PDF and let Acrobat deal with the printing. The actual printing works well and is faster and easier to manage. The problem comes in converting the HTML to PDF. We are running on the latest patched version of CFMX7, but would have upgraded to 8 if this had solved the problems. What we found was that CFDOCUMENT did not correctly honour the CSS in our documents in fact it seemed buggy adding spaces at random to the output. We also tried a tag called CFX_PDF, but this also lacks sufficient CSS support. After trying several tools we settled on ActivePDF which seems to have very good and complete CSS support. Importantly ActivePDF was the only product that properly honoured CSS page breaks. Without this, producing multi-page documents from HTML on different printers on both A4 and Letter size paper is virtually impossible. It seems a great shame that Adobe has NOT produced the best tool for handling PDF in CF. I look forward to more investment from Adobe in this area for future releases.
:)