Discussing the article: "Building a PDF Creation Library in MQL5 (Part1): Writing a PDF by Hand"

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Check out the new article: Building a PDF Creation Library in MQL5 (Part1): Writing a PDF by Hand.

This article shows how a PDF works as plain text by hand‑written two files: a 592‑byte page and an 885‑byte trade ticket. It explains the file structure (header, body, xref, trailer), the required page objects and resources, and the operators that draw text, then provides an MQL5 script to generate them. First part of a pure‑MQL5 PDF library series.

Every trading tool eventually needs to hand a document to a human being. A statement for an investor, a signed trade ticket, a monthly performance report, a receipt for a prop-firm review. The terminal gives you an HTML statement. HTML is fine until someone prints it, emails it, or opens it on a phone. Then the columns shift and page breaks can land in the middle of a table.

PDF does not move. That is the entire reason it exists. A PDF says where every character sits, and it says it in a way that a viewer written twenty years from now will still agree with.

The obvious objection is that PDF must be hard. It has a reputation: a binary format, hundreds of pages of specification, an industry of libraries built to hide it. MQL5 has no PDF function, no external library support without a DLL, and no obvious way in.

That reputation is mostly wrong. This article demonstrates why. A PDF is a text file with an index at the bottom. You can type one in Notepad. By the end of this article you will have typed two of them by hand, opened them in a viewer, and understood every character you typed.

This is the first part of a series that builds a complete PDF library in pure MQL5, without DLLs or external dependencies. But the series starts here, with no library at all, because a reader who has hand-written a working PDF will be able to debug a generated one. A reader who has not, never will.

Author: Sandro Begashvili