I am not sure to what extent you concern about FOP is valid.
You may find that XSLT is a big help in creating the layout dynamically.
You can generate the report specification automatically either on the
client side or on the server side depending on your needs.
I suspect that a mutual fund prospectus can be broken down into a few
page styles.
You have pages of text and images. There may be an infinite possibility
of pages but it is likely that you can describe them in a hierarchical
fashion (chapter, section, subsection) that reduces the number of
choices to a manageable number of templates.
The financial information should be pretty easy to template - there is
only so many ways to structure a Balance Sheet, Income Statement,
Director Shareholding report, etc.
You can decorate the hell out of them but the main information elements
are usually pretty standard (laws, regulations and generally accepted
accounting principles do restrict the formats somewhat)
The regulatory boilerplate will always be structured in a similar way.
Finding the way to integrate a consistent decoration style that matches
the rest of the document should not be too hard.
It may be that the client side may have to select a few templates and
specify some decorations and then instruct the server side to run a
series of XSLT processes that create the final report specification that
FOP uses to create the PDF. This could be passed to the server as a
formating instructions sub-tree structure in the same XML file as the
report information.
I think that a little bit of planning and intelligence applied to the
design of the process could result in a very flexible process that would
be easy to maintain and expand by including new templates or XSLT
processes as new layouts or report subsections are requested.
Just a guess of course. The amount of time that it will take will depend
on the information and visual layouts required to describe the 20+ pages.
We have had great success describing complex visual layouts and
animations in XML for our eLearning delivery system that permits us to
display a wide variety of presentation screens with a very small number
of fairly simple plug-ins to the system that controls the main flow.
XML is pretty powerful and using XSLT to select and merge XML data is a
very powerful approach.
Ron
matt stuehler wrote:
Andy, Ron,
Many thanks for you suggestions. Both look like they have some potential.
FOP looks like the most flexible. The problem with it is that, like
BlazePDF for client-side, it seems like you need to manually describe
your layout item by item, line by line. So, you can imagine that for a
20+ document with a very detailed, complicated layout (think a mutal
fund prospectus), this would be INCREDIBLY time consuming and nearly
impossible to change.
Our application is a proposal generator, so the layout and quality of
the resulting document is very important. It should look like a
professionally designed brochure - not a simple 1 or 2 column word
document.
This seems like this is the type of project that many people have
tackled previously - I'm hoping to hear about someone's success story,
and the approach they used.
Cheers,
Matt
On 12/20/06, Andy Herrman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Not really sure if it'll be helpful or not, but if you can get an
application on the server side that's able to print you could use
PDFCreator to create the PDF itself:
http://www.pdfforge.org/products/pdfcreator
Though I'd do that as a sort of last resort, as it would be better if
you could just generate the PDF directly instead of going through a
couple layers of applications.
-Andy
On 12/20/06, Ron Wheeler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Apache's FOP is probably a good candidate.
> It takes instructions in XML and converts them to PDF's.
> Requires a bit of willingness to play with XML and probably XSLT but
> will make some pretty fancy stuff.
> It is free.
>
> Ron
>
> matt stuehler wrote:
> > All,
> >
> > I'm working on an RIA using Flash. One of the requirements is
that, at
> > the end of the "experience," the user should be able to
> > create/download a PDF containing a bunch of charts, graphs, tables,
> > and text, all customized based on her inputs.
> >
> > I've looked into g.wygonik's blazePDF. While this looks like an
> > awesome component, I don't think it's robust enough to do everything
> > I'll need - the PDF output I'm expecting may easily run to 20+ pages
> > of complex charts - drawing each page line-segment at a time may not
> > be feasible. Plus, the appearance of the output is critical - all
> > kinds of curves, gradients, etc. - the "fancy stuff."
> >
> > Another requirement is that the PDF should "pull-in" a few
> > pre-generated PDFs and incorporate them into the output file.
> >
> > I'm guess I'm looking for a server-side solution.
> >
> > I don't even really know if anything like this is possible, but if
> > anyone has any insights, tips, or experience they could share, I'd
> > greatly appreciate it.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Matt Stuehler
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