PDFlib 8 Windows COM/.NET Tutorial

2 PDFlib Language Bindings
Note It is strongly recommended to take a look at the starter examples which are contained in all
PDFlib packages. They provide a convenient starting point for your own application development,
and cover many important aspects of PDFlib programming.
2.1 Data Types for Language Bindings
In general all development environments have access to PDFlib routines in the same
way. In some cases you should be aware of language-specific data types used for PDFlib
function parameters. In particular, the data types used for strings and binary data may
differ slightly. Table 2.1 lists useful information about these data types.
Table 2.1 Data types in the language bindings
environment string data type binary data type
COM in general BSTR (string) variant of type VT_ARRAY | VT_UI1 1
Delphi with COM String (for 8-bit encodings) or WideString (for Unicode) OleVariant
.NET String byte[ ]
REALbasic string MemoryBlock
1. In other words, a variant array of unsigned bytes.
2.1 Data Types for Language Bindings 27