Anyone using FOP in an browser applet?

[Randall Parker <ra...@nls.net>]

These questions might be off-topic. But I've them in other venues and no one else knew answers. 

I'm thinking about allowing users to download an XML document into a browser applet, allow them to interact with some dialogs, and then to get the result rendered in various ways. This might be a crazy 
idea. I haven't decided yet. I'm just exploring the edges of what is possible to see what might be useful.

What is motivating this is that I want users to be able to request batch jobs of reports from a web server, have the report data (preformatted or not, I haven't decided) shipped down to the browser, and then 
right out to a printer without the user ever having to save a file to disk and without Acrobat or something similar ever having to be invoked. 

Questions:

1) Can a browser send a PDF file directly to a printer driver? 
   Or is Acrobat necessary? 
   I don't want the users to have to go thru a preview mode. I want them to be able to kick off a batch job that sends multiple reports to the printer. 

2) Do you have to use a signed applet to do this from within a browser

3) Is there any reason why a browser's JVM would have a problem running Xerces, JDOM, FOP, and other related pieces? 
   If one used a plugin JVM one could use JRE 1.3 so at least from a version standpoint one would be pretty advanced.

4) Can FOP directly spit out Postscript so as to avoid the need to use some layer that translates PDF to Postscript?
   Or is there a pure Java PDF to Postscript translator somewhere?
    
My potential users are at a fairly small number of locations (50-60 at most) and I could expect them to download the jars and put them in the right place for the browser to get to them. The advantage of 
having them do all this in a browser is that they can do other things at this web site in a browser and they could stay just in a browser to do everything.

My other (and probably sounder) alternative would be to put FOP on the server. Which brings up a final question:

5) Can anyone think of any potential advantages to running FOP from within a browser rather than from a web site?
   For instance, are there types of reports where the resulting PDF file would be far larger than the XML file it was rendered from?