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Issue 6.3

COLUMN

Generating PDF Files

Using Toby Rush's PDF classes

Issue: 6.3 (March/April 2008)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Marc taught himself programming in high school when he bought his first computer but had no money for software. He's had fun learning ever since.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 18,510
Starting Page Number: 34
Article Number: 6315
Resource File(s):

Download Icon 6315.zip Updated: 2008-03-15 12:35:47

Related Web Link(s):

http://www.tobyrush.com/software/rbclasses/realbasicpdf.html

Excerpt of article text...

Are you as sick of hierarchal listboxes as I am? I hope you don't mind, but I thought I'd cover a different topic this issue. Recently I had a project that involved me creating a slew of PDF files. This was essentially a conversion project, translating XML files to PDF.

Now there are a variety of ways this could be accomplished. For instance, the graphic designer in me thought I could write some scripts to automate Adobe InDesign to read in the XML, generate a layout from a template, and output the result as PDF. The problem with this idea is that I haven't had time to do much InDesign scripting, and it's in Javascript, which is too much like C for me to be comfortable. Also, I have experience in automating publishing tools and I knew that such a complicated script wouldn't be easy.

Another method is to use an XLST template to translate the XML to PDF. Here again is an area outside of my expertise: it'd probably take me months to learn how to make a proper XLST and though I might be able to find an existing XML-to-PDF XLST out there, I'd have to customize it for my precise needs, which sounds like I'd need to know what I was doing.

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