Peter Hoeg

You might encounter an error when trying to print to BullZip PDF Printer:

Run-time error '429':
Error creating object: Bullzip.Dictionary

This happens when the bzdct.dll file is not properly registered which can be quite easy to fix.

Try a simple:
regsvr32 bzdct.dll

If you get an ok message everything is peachy and you should be able to print properly.

However, it has happened that due to permission problems the file isn’t being registered properly (which is why I didn’t work in the first place) and you get an error message to that effect. In that case you need to reset the Windows permissions on the relevant files. You can either to it manually as shown below or use the script found on github.com.

Windows XP
secedit /configure /cfg %windir%\repair\secsetup.inf /db secsetup.sdb /verbose

Windows 7
secedit /configure /cfg %windir%\inf\defltbase.inf /db defltbase.sdb /verbose

Was struggling with an unbelievably annoying error, where PDF::Writer (or pdf-writer as it’s also called) simply refused to show special accented characters incl the Euro sign, but presented garbage instead. Turns out that as of pdf-writer 1.1.8, the following is the case:

a) No, it doesn’t accept utf-16, despite what it claims
b) Feeding it utf-8, will look fine for what can be mapped to 7bit ASCII
c) Feeding it Win-1252 seems to do the trick, although some people claim it’s also hit and miss.

In your class doing the PDF generation, add a method like this:

def to_pw(text = '')
  return Iconv.conv('win-1252', 'utf-8', text)
end

And then call that to output all the text.

YMMV, but it worked for me.