I was taking a look through the logs for Feed-Squirrel today and noticed something new.  Back when the site was launched early last year, the CF category was by far and away the most popular category on the site.

Now it seems Flex has taken this mantle, and even Flash has moved up into second position.  So, considering the buzz around CF8, it would appear CF interest is now lower than that of the Flash Platform (admittedly with help from Apollo, Flex 3 and Flash CS3 news).

Now, I’m not going to mention any specific here as I don’t want to suffer from NDA wraith, but it has been previously mentioned that CF8 is going to get itself a whole host of new PDF functionality. Apparently, we will be able to produce top quality PDF’s in any way, shape or form that we desire.

Which brings me onto a CF side-product - CF Report Builder.

Now, I spend a lot of time with the product, producing PDF reports that are customer facing and loaded up with all sorts of branding and niceness. However, one thing I must make know is that in my eyes (and most of the other people I work with), CF Report Builder is the biggest pile of cack I’ve ever had to use. The product is full of bugs, is tricky to use, and manages to do some just plain random things (crashes are only one of them).

So, here’s to hoping CF8 will change things. It seems crazy to me, that despite Adobe placing a whole lot of love of CF & PDF support, that the actual authoring tool for generating PDFs (i.e not CFDOCUMENT) is so bad.

Any plans to fix it Adobe and make it as good as the rest of the product?

A large business may buy a PDF server software package for any of their needs related to converting PDF to text, but for personal use just purchasing a good piece of PDF converter could probably do all you need, with more options than a convert PDF to Word site could offer.