Having the ability to generate PDF files from LabVIEW is a rathercommonrequest. I recently discovered a very simple way to generate PDFs from LabVIEW with a quick modification to some existing NI software. First, you must have the following products installed:
- LabVIEW 2009 or later
- LabVIEW Report Generation Toolkit for Microsoft Office 2009 or later
- Microsoft Word 2007 or later
If you have all of this software, then open vi.lib\addons\_office\_wordsub.llb\Word_Save_Document.vi and make the following modification:
More specifically, add the ".pdf" case with a value of "17" inside. Now, if you wire the path to a PDF file to the Save Report to File.vi for a Word report, then a PDF file will be generated:
We will try to get this change into the Report Generation Toolkit in a future version. I realize that this trick doesn't solve all the use cases (like PDF generation on a system without Word installed), but I'm hoping that it can help out some people today.
