mbtPdfAsm G++ 4.3 Compatibility Patch

by Jon Foster - 2010-04-26
Updated: 2019-04-26

I've used mbtPdfAsm to script the assembly of multiple PDF documents on the fly. Its been a handy tool and one that I have websites that rely on. Recently I tried to re-compile this code for use on a Debian Lenny (5) system. It uses GCC/G++ 4.3. Apparently there are some syntactical errors that previous versions of G++ ignored. So when I ran "make" on my Debian system I ended up with:

pdfString.hpp:16: error: extra qualification 'pdfString::' on member 'pdfString'
pdfString.hpp:18: error: extra qualification 'pdfString::' on member 'pdfString'
pdfString.hpp:22: error: extra qualification 'pdfString::' on member 'copy'
pdfString.hpp:24: error: extra qualification 'pdfString::' on member 'copy'
pdfString.hpp:26: error: extra qualification 'pdfString::' on member 'copy'

So I came up with a simple patch (for v1.0.26) to allow this to work on more recent C++ compilers:

diff -ru mbtPdfAsm-1.0.26-org/pdfString.hpp mbtPdfAsm-1.0.26-new/pdfString.hpp
--- mbtPdfAsm-1.0.26-org/pdfString.hpp	2003-12-16 11:18:24.000000000 -0800
+++ mbtPdfAsm-1.0.26-new/pdfString.hpp	2010-04-24 11:08:41.000000000 -0700
@@ -13,17 +13,17 @@
    int maxLength;
    char *value;
 public:
-   pdfString::pdfString();
+   pdfString();
    pdfString(const char *src);
-   pdfString::~pdfString();
+   ~pdfString();
 
    /* copie une chaine dans value en utilisant le premier caractère [ ou ( pour déterminer si il s'agit
    d'un chaine hexa ou car*/
-   int pdfString::copy(const char *);
+   int copy(const char *);
    /* copie une chaine dans value en utilisant int comme longeuer à copier*/
-   int pdfString::copy(const char *, int, stringType);
+   int copy(const char *, int, stringType);
    /* copie la chaine org dans la chaine this */
-   int pdfString::copy(const pdfString *org);
+   int copy(const pdfString *org);
    int snprint(char *dest, int lg, bool printable); // printable = true si on veut une version affichable de la chaine cela n'et utile que dans le cas d'une chaine hexa
    bool compare(char *c, int lg);

I now have mbtPdfAsm happily running on my Debian installs.

*NOTE* I believe the latest version, as of this writing, 1.0.28, is capable of being compiled without this patch.