Printing to PDF

Invented by Adobe, Portable Document Format (PDF) is the published specification used by standards bodies around the world for more secure, reliable electronic document distribution and exchange. Adobe PDF files look exactly like original documents and preserve the fonts, images, graphics, and layout of any source file — regardless of the application and platform used to create it.Datafile have now added support to report and document printing to allow the creation of PDF files.

When printing a report or document PDF is now one of the options on the print dialog.

If you select PDF then the report/document is sent to Adobe Acrobat Reader for display. From here you can print, save or, on later versions of Adobe, email the document.

Print to Email

In addition to output to PDF, if you send the report or document to email then the attachment will now be created (by default) in PDF format. If you wish to continue to send using TXT attachments then an option has been added to the OPTIONS button for reports to enable you to continue to send as text file attachments.

Security

Various software packages allow editing of PDF files so you may want to protect PDF files created from Datafile from being edited.

An option has been added to the ‘General Multi-User Options’ available from the MASTER sign-on to set a user password for PDF files – before editing a PDF file the package will require entry of this password (note this does not prevent viewing or printing).

Installation

This option is available immediately on update to Release 5.6. However, you must have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed. If not installed then when you attempt to create the PDF file you will be warned accordingly and the system will offer to launch the Adobe website for you to download the file. Adobe Acrobat Reader is free software that allows you to view, share, print and search adobe PDF files.

PDF files are created in the same location as Microsoft Word files would be – controlled by the setting ‘MSWORD=’ within the DATAFILE.INI. Normally set to:

MSWORD=F:\DFWIN\WORD\

Documents are created in sub-folders off this for company-id, report and then user-id – for example:

F:\DFWIN\WORD\DEM\REPORT\TIM\

where DEM is the company-id and TIM is the user-id. The PDF file itself is created with the report or document title and as such will be overwritten on each subsequent run, if you wish to save a copy of the specific report use the ‘Save A Copy’ option from within Adobe itself.