Pretty Printing From An XML File?

Omega1045 writes "Where I work we are developing a new product that receives an XML document (on a W2k workstation), and we need to format and print said document. We are currently using XSLT + CSS to build a cool little HTML page out the the XML, then use a browser to print out the HTML. However, while HTML is a nice format for display, it is not a nice format for printing. We have messed around with the idea of spitting out Rich Text with XSLT. However, Rich Text is confusing and quite frankly sucks. We are looking for a (free if possible) format that we can translate our XML document into via XSLT, and print. The best idea we have at this point is to translate into a Word or OpenOffice XML schema document, and use one of those applications to print. Other ideas?"

Comments

Postscript?

[Hanji]

I'm not actually familiar with the details of postcript at all, but it certainly seems a logical format to consider if printing things is your concern.

Listen to me ;-)

[cookiepus]

I've had do to just this, actually... here's the setup. Don't ask me why certain things were the way they were, certainly you can improve. I inherited some of this. But it worked...

First, we had a bunch of product data in a MS SQL server db. We had a Java (I think) task that nightly dumped XML file (one per product) based on the DB.

Then, we applied an XSLT transformation to each XML to produce the static HTML page for that day (static both to reduce server load and optimize google's searching of it, since Google didn't/doesn't like dynamic content)

Then we wanted to produce a printer catalogue, so rather than printing pages, I made an XSLT that transformed the XML not into HTML but into FOP. FOP is some Java shit from Apache that takes FOP files and spits out a PDF.

Obviously I don't remember details, but it worked.

I had the idea to generate the PDFs not just for the printed catalogues but also as "printable version" for each HTML page. So both PDFs and HTMLs were generated nightly. Yeah it took a while but it was cool.

It also served to improve our pagerank because (1) the PDFs made it look like we've got twice as much content and because (2) google gave higher weightings to PDFs (at the time, anyway)

And, it was easy.