Hey Jeremias, Right now it is just plain text. I guess I got some learning to do. For your point 5 (stream PDF to user), that's write to file, right?
I'll google that as I have never done that. Hopefully there are some good cheat sheets on how to convert text -> XML -> XSLT-> XSL-FO -> PDF. Thanks again! g Re: PDFBox capabilities From: Jeremias Maerki <[email protected]> To:[email protected] ------------------------------ Hi Gary What do you mean by "just text"? Is that HTML markup, some kind of Wiki syntax (since you talk about links) or plain text? Anyway, if you generate HTML you also have to process the text in some way, right? Going towards XSL-FO is then pretty similar. XSLT could also be used to convert the HTML to XSL-FO (with the HTML having to be converted to XHTML by an HTML pretty printer like http://jtidy.sourceforge.net/). I'm sure Apache PDFBox could do it but I'm convinced that it would take more effort and will be harder to maintain. Of course, the XSLT/XSL-FO approach will also take some initial effort, especially the learning process. To summarize, it looks to me like the processing pipeline would look like this: 1. retrieve the "text" from the DB 2. if necessary, convert it to some XML-based markup (XHTML or whatever). 3. use XSLT to convert the markup to XSL-FO. 4. use Apache FOP to convert the markup to PDF. 5. stream the PDF to the user For the browser display, I guess the process could be quite similar (not sure what you have planned: 1. retrieve the "text" from the DB 2. if necessary, convert it to some XML-based markup (XHTML or whatever). 3. insert it into a (X)HTML-based page template (ex. with XSLT) 4. stream the HTML to the user Note: IMO it's important to keep XSLT and XSL-FO apart even though together they make up XSL. Each can be used independently of each other, so the collective term "XSL" is usually not very useful.
