Can I suggest that you will be redoing a lot of design anyway to make your existing stuff into PDF, no matter what product you end up using. I've gone through this process recently, and went with a product called HTML2PDF. I had very different needs than you did though. Most of the HTML to PDF options available via CF just don't support a lot of higher end browser formatting options like HTML4 or CSS, and those that do, do really bad jobs of it. Unless you aren't at all fussy about how your outputted PDF files look, or the reason you need this is just to put a tick next to the 'Must output PDFs' box on a spec sheet, then I think you should be preparing yourself for an amount of tweaking and redoing your existing code that you want output as PDFs.
I looked at the ActivePDF range, but found them to be very inflexible. The other problem I found was that had a huge array of products, and no one product would do the things I needed, and that combining multiple products was either overly complicated or just very expensive. Their local support staff were very hard to deal with and seemed to have no idea about how their products worked and what the best configurations were for various tasks. They just seemed to know the pricing! The HTML2PDF option I decided on has very primitive HTML support, no css support, and some very strange quirks, but now that I've played with it a bit, I can make it do whatever I want (I'm making printed reports, not printed web pages), and it looks a million bucks. Its free and has absolutely no support, but there are a large number of people using it and there's not much support you need for it. Here's its official website: http://128.146.118.49/HTML2PDF/Readme.htm I also looked at HTMLDoc from easysw.com, but found it to be too restrictive as well. It also seemed very promising at first, but failed in the final crunch and I had to abandon it. Hope this helps some. Regards Darren Tracey > -----Original Message----- > From: Dave Watts [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Friday, 30 January 2004 2:48 PM > To: CFAussie Mailing List > Subject: [cfaussie] RE: HTMl to PDF convertors > > > > > From Darren Tracey > > Dave. > There are many variables here that will determine which > option is right > for you. > How important is price? > > budget is tight at this moment but can do with ActivePDF > if no other > options are available > > How many servers will this be installed on? Will it be > installed on one > server or do you need to install it onto many clients' servers? > > just one server > > What exactly do you mean by 'HTML to PDF'? Do you mean that > you want to > make PDF files from a CF page, or do you mean that you want to take > existing HTML pages and make PDF versions of them? > > direct creation of a CF generated web page would be ideal but can > stage the CF output to an HTML file > > > Do you specifically need CSS and HTML4? > > yes otherwise its back to redoing all my web pages > > dave > > --- > You are currently subscribed to cfaussie as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > To unsubscribe send a blank email to > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > MXDU2004 + Macromedia DevCon AsiaPac + Sydney, Australia > http://www.mxdu.com/ + 24-25 February, 2004 > --- You are currently subscribed to cfaussie as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] MXDU2004 + Macromedia DevCon AsiaPac + Sydney, Australia http://www.mxdu.com/ + 24-25 February, 2004
