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Although Quartam PDF Library is a free/open source software (F/OSS) project, giving you a lot of freedom and flexibility as to how you use it in your own projects, this doesn't mean you're free to do anything you want with it: you have to respect the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) version 3 or later.

You can be released from the requirements of the AGPL license by purchasing a commercial license from Quartam Software.

Buying such a license is mandatory as soon as you develop commercial activities involving Quartam PDF Library without disclosing the source code of your own applications. These activities include: offering paid services to customers as an ASP, serving PDF documents generated dynamically in a web application, shipping Quartam PDF Library with a closed source product.

Such a commercial license releases you from the requirements of the copyleft AGPL license, which include:

• distribution of all source code, including your own product
• licensing of your own product under the AGPL license
• prominent mention of the Quartam PDF Library copyright and the AGPL license
• disclosure of modifications to the library

In addition, the commercial license releases you from the requirement not to change the PDF Producer line in the generated PDF document properties.

If you have any questions about the applications of the AGPL or commercial license, please send an email to licenses@quartam.com.

Contributing to the Quartam PDF Library project

Now that Quartam PDF Library for LiveCode is available as open source under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL), you are welcome to contribute to its development.

All you need to do is download, sign and email back the Quartam Open Source Contributor Agreement so that your contributions can be incorporated into the project. Quartam Software handles the role of project custodian, taking care of versioning and distribution.

Jan Schenkel.

If you want to start contributing, you should definitely read up on the Portable Document Format.
It is quite a large specification, so don't expect to 'grok' it all at once. There's plenty of stuff that I haven't even researched

Interesting links:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/pdf/pdf_reference.html
http://wwwimages.adobe.com/www.adobe.co ... 0_2008.pdf

Feel free to focus on certain aspects (such as AcrobatForms or JavaScript support) as you wade your way through it.
There are plenty of interesting features to add!

There are plenty of other free / open source software projects for the creation and manipulation of PDF files.
Here is a shortlist of other projects that you might want to investigate - some of them helped shape Quartam PDF Library for LiveCode:

Java

• iText

PHP

• FPDF
• TCPDF

I will update this list as other projects turn up - feel free to send links to jan.schenkel@quartam.com!

There are few books that thoroughly explain the creation of PDF documents 'from scratch' - nevertheless, I found some books that offer valuable insight:

• Developing with PDF by John Whittington
• Developing with PDF by Leonard Rosenthol

I will update this list as other books turn up - feel free to send links to jan.schenkel@quartam.com!