bisotun

A simple & minimal wrapper library around PDFGen to generate resume/documents/books.

why?

I need to generate PDF files, mostly to write my resume. There are some options avilable:

1. WYSIWYG tools like Microsoft Word or open source alternatives.
2. Typesetting systems like Tex/Latex, groff/troff/nroff, etc..
3. Online websites.

I tested all of the them and TBH none of satisfied me. The values that i appreciate:

• having a tool to allows me generate a PDF file in a simple and minimal manner.

• having 100% control over my tool.

• less LOC can means more chance to read(and understand) the source code by people:

  • LOC of latex: 620428
  • LOC of PDFGen repo: 5987, LOC of bisotun: 400 --> in total: less than 7000!

• and it's not only about LOC. it's also about complexity. i think Latex/Tex is over-complicated for such a simple task.

• And finally i don't want to talk about online tools, since you don't even know what's happening behind the scene :)

structure of the repo

To use bisotun, you can just add it as a git submodule to your current project like this:

git submodule add https://github.com/LinArcX/bisotun
git submodule update --init --recursive

or if you want to do the old way, just copy:

• bisotun.c
• bisotun.h
• PDFGen/pdfgen.c
• PDFGen/pdfgen.h

into your project's directory. there's a example directory that you can find how to use the library.

examples

In example/ directory, you can find resume.c which is currently created as a template for resume files. for sure you can change it based on your taste :) To compile it, you just need a c compiler:

gcc -lm -g -o ./output/resume ./examples/resume.c PDFGen/pdfgen.c bisotun.c

And to run it:

./output/resume

It will generate a pdf file called: resume.pdf. now you can open it with any pdf-reader software.

A pdf file generated with bisotun

limitations

• PDFGen currently doesn't support using TTF fonts.
• It doesn't support hyperlinks.
• PDFGen doesn't support alpha channels in images.