PDF Writers?

Posted by Cliff on Friday October 24, 2003 @12:40PM from the reports-are-a-PHBs-best-friend dept.

Saqib Ali asks: "I am looking for for some OpenSource PDF Writers/Creator. I found one, here. It can basically create PDFs out of common software Like OfficeSuite, Visio, Project or any other Windows Application that uses the Windows Printers. I know OpenOffice can also export to PDF. I am working on a project (fat client) where I need to dynamically create PDF reports from data stored in MySQL DB. I know I can use PHP to create PDFs, and also Apache's Cocoon (you can find an example document, here). Of course, I would like to investigate other OpenSource PDF writers as well. Do you know of any other PDF writers, that I can utilize or learn from by looking at the source-code?"

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XML - FO - PDF by Mulligan · 2003-10-24 13:39 · Score: 3, Interesting

My current favorite for PDF generation is to build an XML document programatically. This document has no layout information, so I use Saxon and an XSLT stylesheet to translate it to XSL Formatting Objects. From there, I use FOP to translate to PDF.

The best part is that the XML document contains the content, while the XSLT stylesheet describes how to make a document out of it. If I need a screen version all I have to do is write another stylesheet to translate to HTML.