Smashup in My Brain.

August 15, 2006, 06:37 pm

The past week I've been doing some unusual stuff at work. One of my clients has been offering the ability to download reports as PDF documents for a while and the way I did it was very easy. I used a tool that converted HTML to PDF. This was quick and easy but you didn't have much control over the presentation and it didn't support CSS so your source HTML documents had shit-tons of <font> tags all over the place.

So, I started working with Apache FOP to convert my (mostly) XHTML documents to FO documents, and then to PDF. This is the right way to do it, but it has definitely been a pain to learn.

While working on this stuff, this is what you'll need to keep in your brain:

Considering that I'm totally unfamiliar with FO and XSL, it's a wonder that I've been able to get anything to work. Fortunately, it is working and is mostly finished.