Coherent Graphics Ltd

I’ve written a version of Ocaml’s Graphics module which outputs PDF directly, using the CamlPDF library - its only dependency. It’s based on the approach of Pierre Weis’ GraphPS program.

It has the same API as Ocaml’s module - just have your build process find the GraphPDF files before it finds the system ones - the vast majority of programs shouldn’t need altering.

Get it here.

I’m pleased to announce the CamlPDF 0.5 release, which includes a couple of new modules (Pdfdate for date manipulation, Pdfannot for annotations and Pdfmarks for bookmarks). Almost every other module has been improved in some way.

Download it here: http://www.coherentpdf.com/ocaml-libraries.html

More importantly, I’ve finally found time to write a short introduction to CamlPDF, which lets you try some basic work within the OCaml top level:

http://www.coherentpdf.com/introduction_to_camlpdf.pdf

There have been some API modifications which are not backward compatible, but the changes to your source are easy to make. This should be the last release with such changes.

There is now a CamlPDF mailing list:

http://www.freelists.org/list/camlpdf

[Part One]

Twenty thousand lines of CamlPDF and cpdf later, here are some numbers:

• Occasions on which conditional compilation is required: 22
• Compilation warnings with fsc –no-warn 62: 15
• Time taken: 22 hours

The current executable appears to be about 8 times slower than OCaml native compilation, but I haven’t examined this enough to know how much we might be able to improve upon it.

I’m planning to clean up the code to see how much of the conditional compilation we can get into a single Utility module.

What’s next is to repackage the command line tools as an API for .NET users. I know very little about this topic, so it’s going to require quite a bit of effort before I’m willing to put it on sale and support it.

If you’re familiar with packaging up libraries for .NET and would like to beta test, drop me a line in the comments, or via our website.

I’ve just uploaded the new version of our tools for merging, splitting, annotating, encrypting and stamping PDF files here.

I’ve just uploaded a new version of our library for reading and writing PDF files from within Ocaml - CamlPDF. New features: