Martin W Smith

I’ve now completed my move to my own domain, which is being hosted by justhost.com. There are a lot of webhosts available on the internet, but justhost.com offer unlimited space, transfer bandwidth, domains, sub-domains & mysql databases, plus a lot more besides, all for a reasonable price. I can’t vouch for support or uptime as yet but setting up was petty painless and their Control Panel is easy to use. Installing this blog was very easy, I had it up and running in a matter of minutes. If you’re considering a web host then you can’t go wrong with justhost.com, in a few weeks I’ll probably write another post once I’ve had a chance to check performance etc.

This blog is now being hosted on my own domain martinwsmith.co.uk the new url is blog.martinwsmith.co.uk.

I’m currently working on a project that requires the automatic rendering of files to PDF, MS Office files work ok but there’s a problem with Visio and Tiff files  so I wrote this simple console app in VB.NET.

Module Module1

Sub Main(ByVal args As String())
OpenFileWithAcrobat(args(0), args(1))
End Sub

Private Sub OpenFileWithAcrobat(ByVal InputFile As String, ByVal OutPutFile As String)
Dim AcroAVDoc As Object
Dim AcroPDDoc As Object
Dim b As Boolean

AcroAVDoc = CreateObject("AcroExch.AVDoc")
b = AcroAVDoc.Open(InputFile, "Temp")

If AcroAVDoc.IsValid Then
AcroPDDoc = AcroAVDoc.GetPDDoc()
AcroPDDoc.SetInfo("Title", "")

If AcroPDDoc.Save(1 Or 4 Or 32, OutPutFile) <> True Then
Debug.Print("Error")
End If

AcroPDDoc.Close()
End If

AcroAVDoc.Close(0)
AcroPDDoc = Nothing
AcroAVDoc = Nothing

End Sub

End Module

The app uses Acrobat Professional 9 and takes as its parameters the path of the file to be rendered to PDF format and the path of where the file should be saved to.  eg. renderer.exe “c:\temp\file.tif” “c:\temp\file.pdf”

It works really well as it maintains page sizes and orientation.  It will needs some error handling adding before it goes into production, but for now it works ok.

I’ve been experimenting with various Social Media sites for a little while and I’ve met some interesting people, I even got some help with a presentation I was working on.  I thought I would add some links to my Social Media profiles:

Twitter
Friend Feed
Facebook
Google Profile
LinkedIn
Google Reader

Welcome to my new personal blog, this blog will be a dumping ground for ideas, thoughts, code excerpts, tips, links and anything else that pops into my head.