Generate PDF documents

Hi Tony.  I am happy that you find XML Extensions easy to use.

Indeed my experience with WYSIWYG layout tools is that I have to tweak the XSL a bit.  I have not used the RenderX tool, but suspect it might be better.  I am not familiar with its commercial terms though.  Other tools exist; searching for 'XSL-FO WYSIWYG' turns up a bunch of stuff.

According to the Apache FOP developers email list, we can expect a release of Apache FOP 1.1 fairly soon (this being open source, 'soon' may mean just about anything).

Tom;

Testing is going well - working through the learning curve re XML, XSL-FO, etc.  

One issue I've come up against is oriental character sets.  Our application screens (done in Acu GUI) are all translatable, including oriental character sets using non-unicode.  The default fonts (ie ACCEPT STD-FONT from "medium-font") work well for this on the screens.

One of my hopes was to include the header data, for reports, in the XML data, so that we could display the report headings in the active language, without having to have different XSL templates for each different language.  The XML export seems to work fine - the non-unicode characters are included in the XML and are correctly rendered when I look at the file.  However, when it renders the PDF, the characters are replaced by "XXXXX".  

I thought it might be a font family issue in the XSL, but I can't figure out what the valid font families are that support the non-unicode characters.  Lots of experimentation hasn't raised my understanding any - so I thought I would ask.  Should I be able to use any installed Windows font in an XSL, or is there a limited selection of font-family values, and if so, where could I find that list?

Thanks

Tony

Hi Tony,

You are in an area of the FOP rendering engine where I have little experience.  The fonts that you are using must be known to the rendering engine and I am also thinking that the fonts probably have to be embedded in the resulting PDF document.  So, this is probably a matter of configuring FOP correctly.

I would start looking at xmlgraphics.apache.org/.../faq.html which will lead to font configuration.  

That said, it may be time to start moving these aspects of your user interface out to your own configuration file -- done in XML of course -- and the pull the desired column headings from the XML configuration document using the XSLT.  This gets the whole user interface aspect of the report out of the COBOL program, and would allow for a more fine-grained customization of the report, should that be desired.

Best regards,

Tom

Another resource is the fop-users mailing list.  You can browse the archive at

mail-archives.apache.org/.../xmlgraphics-fop-users and if you look through July and August, you will see quite a bit of traffic about non-western fonts.  fop-users is an excellent resource to ask questions (esoecially when you can demonstrate you have read the documentation and have tried something).  I am subscribed to this list just to make sure I am aware of things that are happening in FOP (such as the planning for a 1.1 release 'soon').

Tom

Hi!

I am trying to acheive the same as LarryC in post of 14 April 2012. As we have word-print outs, and customers wants that they should be saved as pdf in the cases where they are sent by email to their customers (offers etc.).

Most of the cases, the print should be in Word, but in some cases it should be in pdf. Then your solution seems very good. But my problem is that whe I save with correct saveformat (@wdSaveFormatPDF = 17), it is still saved as a word-document. Saving as other formats, as for instance HTML, works correct. But not saving to PDF. I have generated my def-file for word using word14, and when I write the same code in C# it works correctly. So I does not think there is problem with my installastion of Word etc.

Would it be possible for you to share a small bit of your COBOL code to show the basics of what is working for you ?

Regards Dagl