R&R PDF Export driver and MS Vista

[Brian_Timothy_(Guest)]

Our Software applications use an Amyuni PDF Converter Driver to export reports to PDF. This function has been lost when upgrading to Microsoft Vista. Is there an updated driver available that is Vista compatible? We want to be proactive, since none of our clients have upgraded to Vista or purchased a Vista machine, but we know that day will come. We have encountered a driver incompatibility on our testing computers. I believe we current use an Amyuni Driver 1.59 in our current version of our software. __ ____Thanks,____Brian

[kfleming]

R&R does ship with an older Amyuni driver that was not designed for use under Vista.____Kathleen__R&R Support

[Brian_Timothy_(Guest)]

Kathleen,________Is Liveware developing a Vista ready edition that will support a driver to export to PDF. If so, what does your timetable look like. ______Thanks,____Brian____

[kfleming]

It will be later this year.____Kathleen__R&R Support

[Michele]

Do you have any idea when this would be?____

[kfleming]

Due to licensing difficulties, we will not be able to provide the latest Amyuni PDF driver with the next R&R release. You can however purchase the driver directly from Amyuni http://www.amyuni.com____Regards,__Kathleen__R&R Support

[Cliff_Wiernik]

I don^t understand the licensing difficulties. It appears that in the past that Liveware utilized the PDF Converter product from Amyuni under their license to deliver it to users. It appears that the current version of that driver is still available at a cost similar to the cost for prior versions the last time I looked at their product when I first experienced Win 2003 server block mode driver issues.____So I don^t understand the licensing difficulties comment. We have just assisted in getting the 2GB version of R&R working and now we are being told that we can no longer create PDF^s from within the application without substantial costs on our part.____Could you elaborate in more details. I have been to the Amyuni site.

[kfleming]

The licensing issue is on the Amyuni side. They will not allow us to purchase a developer license for the most recent driver because they are concerned that our developers will in turn use the driver for non R&R applications. This is indeed an unfortunate situation for our users and we are researching other possible avenues to provide PDF export capability to our users.____Kathleen__R&R Support

[Cliff_Wiernik]

That is rather unprofessional on their part. I read their literature it clearly does not have that restriction. However, they must be assuming that if a developer uses the Reportworks runtime and distibutes it with the PDF portion, then they want another runtime license from the developer even though it is an embeded product. As a stand alone PDF driver, it does not work very good an other $15 drivers are available or alternative PDF API^s that don^t require installation as a printer driver.____I purchased one of their single user licenses a while back but they wanted money all the time as it only included 3 months of product updates. Thanks for the info as I will avoid them as a vendor in the future.____You may want to look at BCL Technologies products. Their pdf sdk is a little more expensive, at $1500 last pricing I saw, and it is a activeX type component but it appears to be real easy to use. We needed something more customized in is merging splitting but they wanted $5000/week for that. We were looking for content specific merging without the need of adobe.

[Cliff_Wiernik]

Unless I missed it, I would recommend the PDF file format tools also be able to be create password protected files. This is valuable when emailing files.