Printing in Adobe AIR - Standalone PDF Generation

Question

Is it possible to generate PDF Documents in an Adobe AIR application without resorting to a round trip web service for generating the PDF? I've looked at the initial Flex Reports on GoogleCode but it requires a round trip for generating the actual PDF.

Given that AIR is supposed to be the Desktop end for RIAs is there a way to accomplish this? I suspect I am overlooking something but my searches through the documentation don't reveal too much and given the target for AIR I can't believe that it's just something they didn't include.

Answer 1

One of the other teams where I work is working on a Flex-based drawing application and they were totally surprised that AIR / Flex does not have PDF authoring built-in. They ended up rolling their own simple PDF creator based on the PDF specification.

Answer 2

There's AlivePDF, which is a PDF generation library for ActionScript that should work, it was made just for the situation you describe.

Answer 3

I've done a few posts on generating PDF content / cross-scripting in Adobe Air with Javascript.

http://www.drybydesign.com/2010/01/26/adobe-air-jspdf-a-simple-pdf-solution/ http://www.drybydesign.com/2009/04/22/adobe-air-pdf-cross-scripting-part-2/

-Ari

Answer 4

Just added a Adobe Air + Javascript + AlivePDF demo:

This demo doesn't require flex and is pretty straight forward.

http://www.drybydesign.com/2010/02/26/adobe-air-alivepdf-without-flex/