VM templates producing PDFs

[Ryan Lea <Ry...@Rightmove.co.uk>]

Hi,
 
Have just read on another thread that velocity has been used to produce
custome PDF's.  I had been thinking of using something like cocoon and
xslt.
 
Sooo .... was just wondering how many people have used velocity to
create PDF's and probably more to the point, how?
 
Cheers
 
Ryan

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Re: VM templates producing PDFs

[Peter Harrison <pe...@nothingbutnet.co.nz>]

On Thu, 07 Oct 2004 20:32, Ryan Lea wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Have just read on another thread that velocity has been used to produce
> custome PDF's.  I had been thinking of using something like cocoon and
> xslt.
>
> Sooo .... was just wondering how many people have used velocity to
> create PDF's and probably more to the point, how?

We have used Velocity to create both PDF's and OpenOffice documents.

In fact the same template now creates both HTML and PDF.

The template defines the structure but not the layout. The first stage our 
system goes through is rendering XML from the template through velocity. This 
process imbeds the data into the template.

The second stage is a XSLT transform depending on the target format. If the 
required result is HTML the XML is moved directly into HTML using our HTML 
Transform. If the target format is PDF we have a XSLT transform which turns 
it into an intermediate XML. This is then put through a final third transform 
to create XSL:FO - Formatting Objects. We then use a open source FO Engine to 
render the XSL:FO into a PDF.

We also have a more simple approach which will mean you have to write special 
XML format in order to create PDF's - essentially we drop the intermediate 
few stages and go directly to the final two transforms before rendering.

There are also different ways of handling the output. The simple way is that 
it is output from a servlet - the user just gets the PDF. However, in our 
line of work we often need to also store the document. We have other 
utilities which can generate the document, save it in a database, and also 
return it to the user. We also generate multiple documents all in the same 
request - although we obviously don't open them for the user all at the same 
time.

What even better - we will be making all of this open source. I'm thinking 
about dropping it into velocity tools - although what we have now would be 
much more than just velocity tools.

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