Friday, June 03, 2011

PDF Processing with Perl to include in Electric Cloud

I personally love Electric Commander from Electric cloud when it comes to run automated build. Electric Commander comes with a very good Procedure and Steps engine which can integrate on Multiple agent node and be able to execute perl script.
At the end of the build it is always recommanded to generate a nice report sometimes after running complex automation test.


PDF Packages

I like PDF::Reuse, but there are several other options for PDF creation and manipulation on the CPAN.

PDF::API2, by Alfred Reibenschuh, is actively maintained. It is the package of choice if creating new PDF documents from scratch.
PDF::API2::Simple, by Red Tree Systems, is a wrapper over the PDF::API2 module for users who find the PDF::API2 module to difficult to use.
Text::PDF, by Martin Hosken, can work on more than PDF file at the same time and has Truetype font support.
CAM::PDF, by Clotho Advanced Media, is like PDF::Reuse more focused on reading and manipulating existing PDF documents. However, it can work on multiple files at the same time. Use it if you need more features than PDF::Reuse actually provides.
Conclusions
PDF::Reuse is a well-written and well-documented package, which makes it easy to create, combine, and change existing PDF documents. The two sample applications show some of its capabilities. Two limitations should be mentioned however, PDF::Reuse can't reuse existing bookmarks, and after combining different PDF documents some of the inner document hyperlinks might stop working properly.

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