Developer Question: How to produce PDFs with WIA?

[deko]

Many thanks to the Microsoft team that gave us the Windows Image Acquisition
Automation Library v2.0 Tool, but I still need to get stuff into PDF format.

Then WIAAutSDK readme file says:

"The Windows Image Acquisition Library v2.0 is only designed to support the
PNG, BMP, JPG, GIF and TIFF image formats. It should not be relied upon to
support other formats, though they may appear to be supported depending on
system configuration."

Why can't I get PDF from WIA? After WIA produces a TIFF, can it be
programmatically converted to PDF using VBA? How?

 

[Dances With Crows]

Many thanks to the Microsoft team that gave us the Windows Image
Acquisition Automation Library v2.0 Tool, but I still need to get
stuff into PDF format.

Seems bizarre; PDFs are read-only unless you do a great deal of fooling
around.

"The Windows Image Acquisition Library v2.0 is only designed to
support the PNG, BMP, JPG, GIF and TIFF image formats." Why can't I
get PDF from WIA?

The image formats mentioned are fairly simple. They describe a 2-D
pixel array (or a series of 2D pixel arrays in the case of multipage
TIFF) that's compressed according to a variety of methods. PDF is quite
a bit more complex than that. PDF can contain text (in all kinds of
fonts and sizes), multiple pages, multiple page sizes, weird color
profile junk, embedded fonts, hyperlinks, and images. All these things
mean that PDF is outside this image library's scope. (Well, that and
Microsoft doesn't like to support formats that they didn't invent.)

If you want to make a "PDF" by putting image data within a PDF wrapper,
that's possible, but that seems like a long run for a short slide to me.

After WIA produces a TIFF, can it be programmatically converted to PDF
using VBA?

Not without some extra libraries. http://pdflib.com/ might help, though
I don't know if they have bindings for Visual Baysick. Or you might
check out https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=57796
if your program already has a "Print" function.

 

[deko]

Many thanks to the Microsoft team that gave us the Windows Image

Seems bizarre; PDFs are read-only unless you do a great deal of fooling
around.

Well, we're talking about people's perceptions - that is, "if it's not Word
of PDF, I can't open it".

The image formats mentioned are fairly simple. They describe a 2-D
pixel array (or a series of 2D pixel arrays in the case of multipage
TIFF) that's compressed according to a variety of methods. PDF is quite
a bit more complex than that. PDF can contain text (in all kinds of
fonts and sizes), multiple pages, multiple page sizes, weird color
profile junk, embedded fonts, hyperlinks, and images. All these things
mean that PDF is outside this image library's scope. (Well, that and
Microsoft doesn't like to support formats that they didn't invent.)

If you want to make a "PDF" by putting image data within a PDF wrapper,
that's possible, but that seems like a long run for a short slide to me.

Yes, that's the idea. Again, only to give users a warm feeling that they
will be able to view the document.

Not without some extra libraries. http://pdflib.com/ might help, though
I don't know if they have bindings for Visual Baysick. Or you might
check out https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=57796
if your program already has a "Print" function.

Thanks for the tip.