[Reply]

HI all,

If anyone has had to deal with a bleeding edge area of technology, you will 
appreciate this current issue I'm having. I relate it here just in case someone 
has any pearls of wisdom, other than the obvious cynical view. And to also to 
perhaps warn you off the same path.

The requirement was to provide a distributed system for a client to produce 
documents that would be delivered as a PDF. The system involves a set of 
templates, plus user data entered in a browser - using FCKEditor for the data 
entry.

The app is currently PHP with the view to a service or two in Delphi ( hey 
gotta keep this on-topic  <g>) to speed some things up. 
When dealing with HTML, PDF, CSS and web standards in general, you really need 
to be careful as to the version, and degree to with which vendors and products 
support a standard, and the gap between ideal and reality is often big enough 
to fit your own torso complete. Ouch!!

I originally used a PHP library to generate the PDF's ... sort of OK, but 20 
seconds per page conversion time was unacceptable.

I then managed to get Open Office automated to read the HTML  and then render 
it to PDF - under one second per page. Sounds great doesn't it?  Well one 
little teeny bit of incompatibility in the way OO fails to render table row 
heights properly when converting from HTML to PDF, and the whole thing crashes 
into ugliness.

There's also issues of CSS support, and the need to create an HTML file with 
very explicit markup ( ie each table cell !!! ) as opposed to the elegant class 
structure of CSS.

There a number of sourceforge projects promising to achieve what I wanted, but 
they all seemed to fizzle out sometime in 2006....  oops.

If anyone is contemplating such a project, be very careful.

cheers

Gary



At 16:05 on 16/07/2009 you wrote 
>To  : g...@benner.co.nz
>CC  : >From: Peter Hyde, pe...@webcentre.co.nz
>Content Type: text/plain
>Attached: >
>> I found this which is a good starting point ... since this is exactly
>> what I want to do!!
>>
>> http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=22344
>>
>
>Congrats on finding it!
>
>cheers,
>peter
Ref#: 41006

_______________________________________________
NZ Borland Developers Group - Delphi mailing list
Post: delphi@delphi.org.nz
Admin: http://delphi.org.nz/mailman/listinfo/delphi
Unsubscribe: send an email to delphi-requ...@delphi.org.nz with Subject: 
unsubscribe

Reply via email to