Viewer SDK 10.13/14 Problems

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   After painful trial and error, I was able to install a purchased 10.13 Viewer SDK with Delphi 6 and Windows 7. Only about half of my tests worked the way I expected, but I see a lot of potential in the SDK.  I have gotten very little response from support about reported bugs.  After seeing notification that version 10.14 was ready, I have attempted to install it with minimal success. The OCX doesn't  even have a version number property (that I can find) so I can prove to myself that I'm actually using 10.14.  The library dlls have version specific names, so I can see what I am using, but not the ocx.  

Somewhere between 10.13 and 10.14 there appears to have been a name change so that the installation file installs into "...(x86)\Debenu\PDF Viewer SDK" versus "...\PDF Viewer Control".  The documentation says so little about configuration that I have no clue if this is related to demo versus purchased or accidental versus intentional.  

In trying to figure out what might tell me if I was accessing 10.13 or 10.14 I realized that the documentation didn't even list half of the events I could see and use at design time (many of them didn't work...........).

I really like the QuickPDF library, but the Viewer SDK looks like it should still be in beta.

Sorry for the public negativity, but I really expected some support response in the last week.  I really want to be helpful.....

Howard

Edited by HNRSoftware - 26 Apr 14 at 4:20PM

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HNRSoftware Members Profile Find Members Posts Senior Member Joined: 13 Feb 11 Location: Washington, USA Status: Offline Points: 88	Post Options Post Reply Quote HNRSoftware Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Topic: Viewer SDK 10.13/14 Problems Posted: 26 Apr 14 at 4:19PM
	After painful trial and error, I was able to install a purchased 10.13 Viewer SDK with Delphi 6 and Windows 7. Only about half of my tests worked the way I expected, but I see a lot of potential in the SDK. I have gotten very little response from support about reported bugs. After seeing notification that version 10.14 was ready, I have attempted to install it with minimal success. The OCX doesn't even have a version number property (that I can find) so I can prove to myself that I'm actually using 10.14. The library dlls have version specific names, so I can see what I am using, but not the ocx. Somewhere between 10.13 and 10.14 there appears to have been a name change so that the installation file installs into "...(x86)\Debenu\PDF Viewer SDK" versus "...\PDF Viewer Control". The documentation says so little about configuration that I have no clue if this is related to demo versus purchased or accidental versus intentional. In trying to figure out what might tell me if I was accessing 10.13 or 10.14 I realized that the documentation didn't even list half of the events I could see and use at design time (many of them didn't work...........). I really like the QuickPDF library, but the Viewer SDK looks like it should still be in beta. Sorry for the public negativity, but I really expected some support response in the last week. I really want to be helpful..... Howard Edited by HNRSoftware - 26 Apr 14 at 4:20PM

HNRSoftware Members Profile Find Members Posts Senior Member Joined: 13 Feb 11 Location: Washington, USA Status: Offline Points: 88	Post Options Post Reply Quote HNRSoftware Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 27 Apr 14 at 8:04PM
	I will concede that my preference of Delphi 6 probably makes it difficult for support to try to replicate my problems, but it is extremely painful to work with the Viewer SDK and figure out what is supposed to work and what is not, and which are my problems and which are Debenu's. One thing that makes it painful for me to test the Viewer is that the chosen structure of ActiveX and various hard-coded version references (10.13/10.14) makes it impossible(?) to have version 10.13 and 10.14 on the same system. Personally, I have Delphi 6 on a desktop machine and a laptop and Delphi XE5 on another desktop, but coordinating code is a royal pain. There are several reasons I wish to stay on Delphi 6 wherever possible. A couple of days ago, I got SDK 10.14 successfully installed on the laptop and was able to actually compare SDK 10.13 on one system to 10.14 on another (both Delphi 6 Windows 7). I use a 200Mb, 500 page test pdf file with lots of images in it to provide a serious load for testing. The first thing I noticed on 10.14 was that a Viewer open to page 1 was now taking well over 20 seconds in 10.14 as opposed to about 2 seconds in 10.13. This morning I painfully installed 10.14 into my other desktop which has Delphi XE5. I see the same 20 second+ open to page 1 on this machine. My conclusion is that something happened to the rendering logic between 10.13 and 10.14. I had complained about non-functioning KeyDown and MouseMove events. Now that I have installed 10.14 in the XE5 system, the XE5 component does not show those 2 events at all, but they still do show up in the Delphi 6 installation. This is way too subtle for me, but my guess is that these two events are not intended to show up at all in any version, especially since there is no mention of them in the documentation (such as it is). I think I am about ready to abandon the Viewer SDK until some more stable structure emerges. The various places where explicit file names and version number references are used make it unreasonable to create any serious projects which will all have to be hand-edited and re-compiled on any subversion number change. It got too weird to test, but I think that a decently working 10.13 exe file stopped working once the 10.14 version was installed, even though the DLLs were still where the program expected to find them. What I think this means that any deployment of an executable to another system will not be compatible with some later executable that used a different subversion. It is also possible that I am totally misreading what actually happened, but there is only so much testing I am willing to do on such minimal documentation. I'm pretty sure there is a significant design bug relating to the properties "LibraryPath" and "RendererPath" which is requiring these to be filenames rather than "path"s, so that those properties have to be hand-edited if a subversion changes. Maybe someday...... "More in sorrow than in anger..." -- Howard Edited by HNRSoftware - 27 Apr 14 at 8:08PM

everybyte Members Profile Find Members Posts Beginner Joined: 01 May 14 Location: NL Status: Offline Points: 2	Post Options Post Reply Quote everybyte Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 01 May 14 at 2:58PM
	Debenu recently released a separate renderer DLL to overcome problems with GDI+ renderer. Viewer SDK uses this new renderer DLL . What I noticed lately is that renderer 10.13 fixed a certain problem I had previously with one particular PDF and non-renderer version of QuickPDF (transparency was not handled properly and as a result a piece of text was not rendered). Now version 10.14 of the renderer has the old problem again. Support does not answer for several days. It can well be a version mismatch blunder.

HNRSoftware Members Profile Find Members Posts Senior Member Joined: 13 Feb 11 Location: Washington, USA Status: Offline Points: 88	Post Options Post Reply Quote HNRSoftware Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 01 May 14 at 3:56PM
	Interesting thought. Version mismatch is going to be a very serious problem with the logic they have chosen for dll and ocx naming, and there don't appear to be calls or properties to return version numbers for anything except the basic library. This early in the product development cycle, I find it reasonable to help them find individual bugs, but with such a tangled release logic, I'm not willing to re-engineer my code whenever a subversion changes.