PowerBuilder provides two ways to save a DataWindow object or DataStore in Portable Document Format (PDF).
By default, when you select File>Save Rows As and select PDF as the file type, the data is printed to a PostScript file and automatically distilled to PDF using GNU Ghostscript. This option provides a robust solution that can save most types of DataWindow objects.
Installing Ghostscript
For licensing reasons, Ghostscript is not installed with PowerBuilder.
You (and your users) must download and install it before you can
use this technique. See “System requirements for the distill method”.
Building on the ability to save data as XML, PowerBuilder can also save the DataWindow object’s data and presentation to PDF by generating XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO). This option provides a platform-independent solution by rendering the DataWindow using a Java process rather than the Microsoft GDI. It also offers the possibility of customizing the PDF file at the XSL-FO stage. Saving as PDF using XSL-FO is particularly useful if you want to print DataWindow objects in EAServer on a UNIX operating system by using Java printing. The Ghostscript method is not supported on UNIX.
The XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) W3C Recommendation has two parts, XSLT and XSL-FO. XSLT provides the transformation typically used to present XML documents as HTML in a browser. XSL-FO provides extensive formatting capabilities that are not dependent on the output format.
For more information about XSL, see the latest version of the Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL).
The Ghostscript method currently does not support OLE and RichText DataWindow objects. The XSL-FO method currently does not support OLE, RichText, graph, and composite DataWindow objects.
