Transcript Dynamically Generating PDF files

The Road to Pagination
Steve Drucker
CEO
Fig Leaf Software
Pagination Techniques
 Using
Cascading Style Sheets
 Generating
Rich Text Format
(RTF) Documents
 Generating
PDF Documents
Using Cascading Style Sheets

Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.x supports
pagination through using the page-breakbefore: always or page-break-after: always
style property

Apply this property to a tag selector for the
most robust support

Note: You cannot break a page in the middle
of an HTML table.
<STYLE>
H6 {
page-break-before:always;
}
</STYLE>
Generating MS-Word Docs
 Convert
HTML to RTF through
OLE-Automation of MSWord
 Generate
RTF Directly through
ColdFusion
Invoking MS-Word as a
COM Object

Advantages
 Easy to Implement

Disadvantages
 Not as scalable as generating RTF directly
 Not multi-threaded
 MS-Word must be loaded on the Server
 Security issues
 Microsoft KB Article
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb
;EN-US;q257757

Notes
 ColdFusion must login under an account name
versus a local system account in order to invoke
Word as an ole-automation object
Demonstration
Invoking Word as COM Object
<CF_ConvertHTML2Word>
Generate RTF Directly
Through CF

RTF (Rich Text Format) is a markup
language similar to HTML.

Unfortunately, RTF is white-space
sensitive

MS-Word’s default file format

You can prototype your page in MSWord, save the file as RTF, and then
add <CFOUTPUT> tags where
appropriate
Generating PDF Documents
 What
is PDF?
 What
business problems does
PDF solve?
 Free
Solutions for Creating PDFs
 Interfacing
with COTS for
Creating PDF’s
What is PDF?
 PDF
(Portable Document Format)
 Requires
Adobe Acrobat viewer
on the client
COTS for PDF Generation
 ActivePDF
www.activepdf.com
 Adobe
Distiller
 Others…
Using ActivePDF

On 2/12/02, ActivePDF released SP4 for its product
line

This new service pack allows you to convert HTML
that includes CSS formatting into PDF

This distribution includes <CF_Html2ActivePDF>
that invokes ActivePDF Server/ActivePDF Web
Grabber as COM objects.

ActivePDF actually uses IE 6 as a rendering engine

IE 6 must be loaded on the server

ActivePDF includes a utility that allows it to invoke
IE6 under a specified user account.
Summary
Other Resources
 ActivePDF
www.activepdf.com
 CFCOMET
www.cfcomet.com