[Catalyst] Re: Which C::View::PDF should I use?

[Aristotle Pagaltzis]

* Steve Kleiman <steve at prodhub.com> [2010-03-14 17:10]:
> I've been using iText (http://itextpdf.com/) after using
> PDF::API2 for years. API2 hasn't grown and even once you know
> it, it's tricky to use. The community is inactive.
>
> iText is Java and the community is vibrant. I'll have my
> Catalyst app assemble a whole bunch of data and ship it to
> iText as a JSON object (iText reads XML, too). Then I have
> a program I wrote in Java suck in the JSON and render the PDF.
> It's way faster than Perl and there's all sorts of handy
> features that make doc generation easier.

On our project, we dropped some cash coin to buy a licence for
PrinceXML <http://princexml.com/>. That thing is totally awesome,
you give it pretty much any old XHTML with CSS and it spits out
a PDF that looks the way you’d expect. It also supports a bunch
of custom CSS rules for even more control. It’s not cheap, but
for our purposes the price was completely worth it – I spent some
time integrating it, but it has completely eliminated all further
work related to producing PDFs. (In contrast, our Excel exports
f.ex. have consistently consumed non-trivial amounts of work.)

As a rule I don’t like closed-source, binary stuff, but PrinceXML
has proven to be an exception.

Regards,
-- 
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>