PDF is an initialism (versus an acronym, which is slightly different...) for "Portable Document Format", a file format created by Adobe [http://www.adobe.com/].
[CL] maintains a page
[http://phaseit.net/claird/comp.text.pdf/PDF.html]
on the subject.

While there's no [Tcl]-specific broadly-applicable PDF library as of summer 2003, PDFlib
[http://www.pdflib.com/]
supports Tcl among several other language bindings.  Notice at the heart of PDFlib's
licensing
[http://www.pdflib.com/purchase/howtobuy.html]
this summary:  "You may test and fully include our software in your projects, but you
need a valid license key to remove the 'www.pdflib.com' demo stamp on
all generated pages."

[Perl] and [Python] have much stronger PDF stories to tell (see
[http://www.unixreview.com/documents/s=7822/ur0304g/], for example), and, of course,
Tcl has ways to exploit anything available through those languages, including
[Tclperl] and [Tclpython].
----
[Clif Flynt] worked on generating PDFs from Tcl.

[Lars H] has written a pure Tcl package '''writepdf''' 
(see [http://ftp.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/tclldoc/examples/] and its parent directory) 
that can generate well-formed PDF files. 
The API is roughly at the same level of abstraction as writing 
raw [postscript] with [puts], so you need to be familiar with 
the PDF specification to use it.

''It would be great to have something sitting on top of writepdf which can generate correct pdf from a text widget and a canvas...It seems like this ought to be possible in pure Tcl.''

[Lars H]:
It is certainly possible (at least to the same extent as the analogous 
generation of PS files). I suspect the main difficulty would be how to
handle text, or more precisely, select a font that matches that used
in the original widget. My more immediate interest was otherwise to be
able to use PDF as an "export format" for graphics not really having 
anything to do with [Tk], but I don't know when I can return to even 
that part of the project.

----

2003-11-25 [VI]  The PDF specifications are at http://partners.adobe.com/asn/tech/pdf/specifications.jsp





While there are relatively few direct Tcl-PDF connections as
of late 2001, "pdf417_encode [http://freshmeat.net/projects/pdf417_encode/] converts ASCII strings into pdf417 [barcode]". NOTE: PDF417 barcodes have
nothing whatsoever to do with Adobe's Portable Document Format.

----
 What: TEItools
 Where: http://xtalk.price.ru/SGML/TEItools/
 Description: Collection of Tcl and other tool scripts used for
        transforming SGML documents to various other formats.  Currently
        supports HTML, LaTeX2e, RTF, PS, and PDF.  Uses CoST.
 Updated: 04/1998
 Contact: mailto:boris@xtalk.msk.su

 What:  WELD
 Where: http://www.javafoundry.com/javapdf
 Description: Web Enabled Logic Documents (WELD) make use of Jacl/Tcl to
        provide the ability to hold WWW applications together.  WELD is
        a part of JavaPDF (the open source servlet utilities project).
 Updated: 08/2001
 Contact: mailto:lhall@JavaFoundry.com (Lee T  Hall)

 What: pdflib
 Where: http://www.pdflib.com/
 Description: PDFLib is an ANSI C library for creating new PDF files.
        Bindings for a number of languages, including Tcl, are available.
        This package is not designed to access and update existing PDF
        files.
 Updated: 11/1999
 Contact: mailto:tm@muc.de




----

[Sven Sass]'s employer generates PDF by way of [Java] classes
converting [Docbook] to [FO] to PDF (!).





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The most immediate contact between PDF and Tk probably is by way 
of [PS], the "output" format for [canvas]es.  [Clif Flynt] has "a
subset of a Tcl canvas->PDF script ... [[which]] does lines,
text, and nested canvases" in the [starkit] at
http://noucorp.com/postcard .

Another well-worn pathway involves [transforming HTML to PDF].

----
[GS] (031129) There is a simple C source code to convert text 
file in PDF at http://wwwvms.mppmu.mpg.de/vmssig/src/c/TXT2PDF.C

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[Category Acronym] | [Category Documentation]