Thanks Will. This is the sort of advice I was hoping for. From the little I have played with FOP this makes sense. I would be interested in looking at any code you would like to share.
Luke ----- Original Message ----- From: "Will Gilbert" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 11:30 AM Subject: Re: New To Fop > > Luke, > > What you are looking to do comes up pretty often on this list so you > will probably get quite a bit of help. > > Here's mine.... > > What you will need to do is go from HTML into XML then into FO, once in > FO, FOP can render it quite quickly into a PDF, your browser can even > be used as the delivery mechanism. > > I wrote a Java Servlet which is invoked via an HTML page link, the > links passes the necessary parameters. In your case that will be a > reference to the original HMTL file. > > The next step is not obvious, hence this e-mail. Not all HTML is > XML-ready, humans make mistakes which most browsers correct, unbalanced > and missing tags for example. Also some tags need to be doctored, <BR> > and <HR> come to mind, these have no closing tags. What I did here was > to use the Tidy engine/library to fix up my HTML into valid XML. > > Now the job gets pretty easy... > > The next step is to develop an XSL transform which takes HMTL tags and > create FO XML. I have some transforms which I am very happy to share > with you, as will others. Nobody has a complete HTML to FO > implementation as this would be huge but you can get most of the > transform working quickly and then add to it as needed. > > Once you have the FO XML -- BOOM, a few lines of code later and you've > got your PDF. > > The servlet I wrote actually communicates back to the browser every > second and fakes an elapsed progress timer. We had to do this as we > originally were running on slow hardware and have very impatient. With > our hardware these days the transform and PDF generation runs so > quickly, the interaction is more of a nuisance that an aid. But at the > time that is what the boss wanted, so I wrote it. > > --will > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
