Mailing List Archive: 49091 messages
  • Home
  • Script library
  • AltME Archive
  • Mailing list
  • Articles Index
  • Site search
 

[REBOL] Re: pdf-maker example

From: jan:skibinski:sympatico:ca at: 3-Nov-2002 11:28

Hi Gabriele, Have you considered combining your pdf-maker with Gavin's xml-parser/xml-object? A good idea what the two could do together can be found in the iText Java PDF library http://www.lowagie.com/iText/ One does not need to have Java installed to browse through the excellent documentation above. All one needs is the Acrobat reader. Of particular interest is chapter 7 and especially the piece about tagmaps, which allow mapping of custom business tags into document-oriented tags of the iText library. Very little effort is required to make tagmap.xml and just few lines of java driver will drive the tagmap and a business xml file to produce quite decently looking PDF books. And RTF and HTML output at the same time if one wishes to - although they will not look as good as PDF unless one would adjust the tagmap file to better match the RTF stuff. The tagmap approach is not as generic as XSLT, but consider this: you can bypass XSLT and FOP, so instead of using three different engines you can just stick with one. A rebol engine! Several years ago I wrote a package "fun-pdf" with scripts written in Ocaml, Haskell and Q to interface to C PDF library "pdflib". Among other things the scripts provided convenience functions for extracting and processing pieces of external text and image files. In hindsite, I would have done much better if I provided a support for XML instead. Just a food for thought, Jan Gabriele Santilli wrote: