PDFlib Personalization Server (PPS)
PDFlib Personalization Server (PPS) and PDFlib Block Plugin
The PDFlib Personalization Server (PPS) includes PDFlib+PDI plus additional methods for variable data processing using PDFlib Blocks. PPS makes applications independent from layout changes.
The designer creates a layout PDF and marks areas as placeholders for variable text, images and graphics using the PDFlib Block Plugin for Acrobat. Each Block contains a variety of Block properties such as font size, color, image scaling options etc. The PDFlib Block Plugin offers a Preview feature which shows the results of filling Blocks according to the specified properties.
The developer writes code to fill PDFlib Blocks with text, images, vector graphics or PDF pages. He doesn’t need to know the formatting or position of a Block. Use PPS for all PDFlib+PDI tasks plus mail merge with text and images, template filling for transactional and statement processing, personalizing promotional material, generating individual parts catalogs from a database or producing customized documentation for multiple products.
PDF Form Fields or PDFlib Blocks?
The primary distinction is that PDF form fields are optimized for interactive filling, while PDFlib Blocks are targeted at automated filling. Applications which need both interactive and automated filling can easily achieve this by using a feature of the PDFlib Block Plugin which automatically converts form fields to blocks. Although there are many parallels between both concepts, PDFlib Blocks offer several advantages over PDF form fields as shown in the table below.
| Feature | PDF form fields | PDFlib Blocks |
| design objective | for interactive use | for automated filling |
| typographic features (beyond choice of font and font size) | – | kerning, word and character spacing, underline, overline, strikeout |
OpenType layout features | – | dozens of OpenType layout features, e.g. ligatures, swash characters, oldstyle figures |
complex script support | limited | shaping and bidirectional formatting, e.g. for Arabic and Devanagari |
| font control | font embedding | font embedding and subsetting, encoding |
text formatting controls | left-, center-, right-aligned | left-, center-, right-aligned, justified; various formatting algorithms and controls; inline options can be used to control the appearance of text |
change font or other text attributes within text | – | yes |
| merged result is integral part of PDF page description | – | yes |
| users can edit merged field contents | yes | no |
| extensible set of properties | – | yes (custom Block properties) |
use image files for filling | – | BMP, CCITT, GIF, PNG, JPEG, JBIG2, JPEG 2000, TIFF |
| use vector graphics for filling | – | SVG |
| color support | RGB | grayscale, RGB, CMYK, Lab, spot color (HKS and Pantone spot colors integrated in the Block Plugin), DeviceN |
PDF standards | – | PDF/A, PDF/X, PDF/VT, PDF/UA |
| graphics and text properties can be overridden upon filling | – | yes |
transparent contents | – | yes |
Text Blocks can be linked | – | yes |