Berlin – callas software, market leader for automated PDF quality control and archival solutions, today releases an update for its pdfChip product line. pdfChip converts HTML into good, standards-compliant PDF documents. The pdfChip 1.2 update focuses on ease-of-use and implements improvements for barcode and SVG workflows.

Debug Plug-In for Chrome

One of the challenges in developing pdfChip templates, is figuring out the right HTML to get the effect in PDF that you want. This is especially difficult, because an HTML template using JavaScript will not open correctly in a standard browser such as Chrome. With pdfChip 1.2 comes a Chrome plug-in that emulates the pdfChip specific JavaScript objects and functions. This makes it possible to use the Chrome JavaScript debugger for your templates.

Extended support for barcodes

pdfChip contains a built-in barcode library that supports over 100 (119 to be precise) barcode types. Many of these barcodes have special features and parameters that could not be used in pdfChip. From pdfChip 1.2 on, these specific parameters can also be used in your templates, making the barcode functionality even more powerful.

At the same time, it is now possible to use much more coloring schemes for barcodes, opening up a wide array of more creative barcode uses.

InDesign template generator

pdfChip templates can be created with any good text editor or with a tool specifically targeted towards web design. For those people who feel more comfortable with design tools, such as Adobe InDesign, callas released the pdfChip template generation export filter for Adobe InDesign with the pdfChip 1.2 release. This export filter converts an InDesign document into a correct pdfChip template, correctly taking over the positions of all elements on the page, the color and styles of page elements and more.

This allows to dramatically reduce the time required to build a correct pdfChip template.

Additional features

Creating a template that correctly loads fonts and images can be difficult, because of the asynchronous way pdfChip (and the WebKit engine within) handle those page resources. In pdfChip 1.2, there is a new, elegant way, to handle this problem.

pdfChip is capable of outputting more than one PDF document. When generating business cards for example, each business card could be saved in a single PDF file. It is now also possible to cross link between those files. This means that each generated PDF file can contain links to one or more of the other generated PDF files.

Most of the time, pdfChip templates will be a mix of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and where necessary enhanced with things, such as MathML or SVG. Sometimes, more simple needs could be handled by a single SVG file however. pdfChip 1.2 allows specifying a single SVG file which will be converted into a PDF seamlessly.