Bruno shouldn't be "proud" of the price of iText because they are way, way too low.
I see here questions that involve the other side of software engineering: the part many people ignore. So this is a digression, but maybe not: similar to people who ask obvious questions about iText but since they are continually asked they should be answered. Software engineering is ... engineering. That is we trade between a series of constraints to produce something that is hopefully valuable to our buyer, designed to require little support, and we do that within the constraints we have. Some of these are physical constraints of technology or science. We must not build a piece of software for wide release that requires, say, 1TB of RAM per machine because it's very unlikely the machines will have this. We may be able to do great things with so much memory -- very fast real-time detailed 3D rendering of entire city blocks at once -- but the benefit is irrelevant because the machines required to run them would be too expensive. Other constraints are legal. For example, we know we can make a great deal of money with websites or software that redistributes music or movies we don't own, or that steals money from the end-users, but this is illegal and unethical so we don't do that either. We don't even think about obeying these constraints while designing: it would be ludicrous to ignore them. But other constraints are time and money and we ignore these all the time. If a customer wants a feature that requires programatically generated PDF why would you quote a program including iText without first finding out licensing fees?! This is like quoting a price to build a house on a parcel of land, including acquisition of the land in your quote, and not first purchasing or finding out the price of the plot of land. Just like it is insulting to Bruno when people won't do basic research into how to use iText it is insulting to refuse to pay for it, or to assume it is worth nothing, or should be free. Years ago I built PDF's from scratch, before pdflib and iText were available, and it was awful: it is tedious and time consuming. Bruno's solution, iText, works great. If your customers are insisting on PDF generation then you can make your own PDF's, you can use an old version of iText, you can try to license another component, you can tell them it will be too expensive, but you can't just say "I want to buy a Mercedes and only budgeted for a Volkswagon, so you must sell me a Mercedes for the price of a Volkswagon" and that is *exactly* what you are doing, except the machine is a software component rather than a car. Engineering and ignoring constraints is hacking; no different than writing poor code. Bruno should not have to deal with either. Michael. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ iText-questions mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/itext-questions Buy the iText book: http://www.itextpdf.com/book/ Check the site with examples before you ask questions: http://www.1t3xt.info/examples/ You can also search the keywords list: http://1t3xt.info/tutorials/keywords/
