Bert Vingerhoets wrote: > Another way to render custom XML into a PDF document (although Bruno might not > like hearing this) is to write an XSLT stylesheet instead of Java code, that > converts the XML to XSL-FO and then use an existing XSL-FO renderer such as > Apache's FOP to convert the intermediary output into PDF.
Actually, I use this approach in a project at Ghent University. Every student at the university has a track record of enrollments, curricula, payments, etc... For some students this is very straight forward: one contract, one subscription, one study program. For others, it can get quite complex: they switch courses, switch study programs, switch contracts,... Also the fee that has to be paid depends on the courses and as there curricula aren't always known in advance, students often pay part of there invoice up front, and part of it as soon as there curriculum is known. All this information is kept in different places: their academic carreer is different from their payment history. In the past, it was very hard to check all this data. An administrator needed different applications to find all the necessary data. So a colleague and I wrote an application that bundles all this information in one XML file. I wrote a series of XSLT files that renders this XML to HTML so that an administrator can see the complete picture in one glance. (Very handy when a student phones the administration asking why he has to pay that much.) The XSLT also generates a "human readable" letter explaining the invoice in "human readable" language. That part can be rendered to PDF using HTMLWorker in the form of an invoice for the student. So no: I'm not against the use of XSLT. > If you have a somewhat larger scale environment and need to process > lots of requests, maybe Scriptura DocumentFlow might suit your needs. Note that iText is used inside Scriptura, but in spite of what you'd expect, there is no mention of iText on any site from Inventive Designers whatsoever (at least: I didn't find any link to iText). Therefore I have the strong impression that Inventive Group does very little effort to promote iText, although they are making good money with it. That's very counter-productive. Commercial use of Free Software is accepted, but a company "sins" against the spirit of F/OSS if it doesn't do anything in return to support the F/OSS projects it uses. There is however another company that offers an XSL:FO solution: http://www.renderx.com/ That company, although also commercial (as is Scripture), is really "iText-friendly". Dear Bert, can you tell me if Inventive Group is respecting the MPL license? More specifically: when Scriptura is rebranded, how does your company assured that iText isn't rebranded in the process? You are aware of the fact that it is forbidden to change the iText producer line, aren't you? best regards, Bruno ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge _______________________________________________ iText-questions mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/itext-questions Buy the iText book: http://www.1t3xt.com/docs/book.php Check the site with examples before you ask questions: http://www.1t3xt.info/examples/ You can also search the keywords list: http://1t3xt.info/tutorials/keywords/
