I just remembered one project I came across recently: http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/
I would consider using that also, and wish I had come across it earlier. Templating or generating HTML documents is very convenient, and if you're doing a web front end, you have all the libraries you need already. Vladimir On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 3:30 PM, Vladimir Sedach <vsed...@gmail.com> wrote: >> if i were to start today, i'd either generate libreoffice's xml format >> (you can exec commandline tools to generate pdf); > > I tried this two years ago and ran into some problems. As I remember: > > OpenOffice (of which Libre Office is a fork) had a weird client-server > model for command-line use. It was a pain to set up initially, and the > version of OpenOffice that came with Debian on our servers didn't work > at all. The best way to check if a document would finish being printed > as a PDF was to poll the filesystem. It took a long time to generate > the PDFs, and what's worse is that this time varied widely with no > apparent causes. The whole process was unreliable. > > The templating itself was tricky. As you mentioned the node order > matters, but also there were all sorts of undocumented dependencies > between nodes (I was templating spreadsheets) and how node attributes > were used. > > Maybe things have improved by now, but if I had to do the same thing > again I would not rely on Libre Office. There's too much bloat to deal > with on both the development and system administration sides. > > The big draw with Libre Office was that you can let business users > easily customize the templates. A friend of mine is doing a SaaS web > app in Common Lisp, generating documents via LaTeX, and is making a > small web app that lets users customize the template layout. IMO this > is simple enough to do that it's the approach I would use today (using > CL-PDF or maybe cl-typesetting directly instead of going through > LaTeX). > > Vladimir > _______________________________________________ pro mailing list pro@common-lisp.net http://lists.common-lisp.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pro
