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pdfgraphicspdf-generation

Generate PDF from structured data

I want to be able to generate a highly graphical (with lots of text content as well) PDF file from data that I might have in a database or xml or any other structured form.

Currently our graphic designer creates these PDF files in Photoshop manually after getting the content as a MS Word Document. But usually, there are more than 20 revisions of the content; small changes here and there, spelling corrections, etc.

The 2 disadvantages are:

  1. The graphic designer's time is unnecessarily occupied. The first version is the only one he/she should have to work on.
  2. The PDF file becomes the document which now has the final revised content, and the initial content is out of sync with it. So if the initial content needs to be somewhere else (like on a website), we need to recreate it from the PDF file.

Generating the PDF file will help me solve both these problems. Perhaps some way in which the graphic designer creates a "Template" and then puts in tags/holders and maps these tags/holders to the relevant data.

Solution

  • There are some tools out there for doing this. XSL-FO is useful. Here is a tutorial for creating a pdf from xml (or xhtml) with cocoon. Also see Apache FOP.

    You could format your SQL data as XML and still use the same templates this way.