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.
Hey Neil, we’ve made massive strides in terms of quality and robustness with Report Builder in CF8. Some of the fundamental problems, quite frankly, were related to the older version of Selphi and 3rd party components we used for Report Builder in CF7. Things should be 1000% better now that we’re compiling with the very latest Delphi compiler and components (3 full versions later than what we used in CF7) and the newest 3rd party components.
Please do let me know directly (dcooper@adobe.com) if you find this NOT to be the case. We’ve worked very hard to help make sure RB got the love it needed this release, and I allocated significant time for plain bug fixing (we’ve fixed hundreds of issues overall in RB in CF8).
Damon
Director of Engineering
Adobe
That is good news Damon. Look forward to seeing improvements. From what I witnessed (don’t touch anything that’s not code myself) it’s the stability that makes it hard to work with.
Just be thankful you’re not faffing around with Crystal Reports… now that really is a pile of cack.
Hi Neil. The new ColdFusion 8 beta Report Builder is available on Labs as well! http://www.adobe.com/go/coldfusion8_reportbuilder