I know less about iText, and i am not sure if iText supports PDF creation based on PDF template. If someone has developed a WriterAdapter for iText, i think it will be welcome:)
bluejoe ----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Velocity Users List" <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, October 17, 2008 5:09 AM Subject: Re: Can velocity be used for generating reports in PDF > The problem is that the Velocity Engine pushes its output to a Writer (an > argument to the mergeTemplate() method) but iText doesn't include a Writer > class that can be used for the purpose - creating a PDF in iText means > creating a Document object then calling methods of that class to add > "chunk" objects, each of which contains the text along with the font/style > settings that apply to that text. So the Writer class I developed was a > bridge between the Writer interface that Velocity needs, and the call-based > interface that iText uses. > > As I mentioned this was a while ago. It's possible that by now the > developers of iText have added a Writer interface that would make things > simpler, and it's also possible that there's a third-party package to do > this. Also bear in mind that iText isn't the only PDF generation package > (the page you linked mentions several) and it's possible that one these has > a Writer that will work with Velocity. > > Adrian Tarau <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on 10/16/2008 02:54:48 PM: > >> Why not using iText directly (or some other library) to generate PDF? >> Using Velocity to generate PDF is not a good way to go... >> >> http://java-source.net/open-source/pdf-libraries >> >> >> [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >> > The way I did this was to have my Velocity templates generate output > text >> > that was sent to a PDFWriter class that I wrote. This class detected >> > special markers in the input stream that indicated new paragraphs, >> > bold/underline/italic sections, font changes, images etc., and made > calls >> > to iText to create the "chunks" that iText uses and add them to the PDF >> > output document on the fly. It could handle basic stuff (paragraph > styles, >> > multiple fonts, tables, background colours and images, embedded images) > and >> > was adequate for what I needed it for. It couldn't handle more advanced >> > stuff like floating sidebars, but that wasn't something I needed. >> > >> > That was a while ago. If I was going to do the same thing again I'd > have >> > the Velocity templates produce XML and base the Writer on > Commons-Digester. >> > >> > It's always possible that there is a direct PDF Writer class out there >> > already that accepts input text in some handy form like XML - I just > did a >> > quick Google and didn't find anything, but it's such an obvious thing > I'd >> > be surprised if there isn't *something*. >> > >> > >> > --------------------------------------------------------------------- >> > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> > >> > >> >> >> --------------------------------------------------------------------- >> To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >
