Re: [xsl] Generating PDF forms with XSLT?

[Dennis <maillistboxes@xxxxxxxxx>]

There is no way to directly generate the PDF forms.
You need to do lot of exercise. You XML should go to a
standard format to be transformed to an XSL.
PDF can be seen as a tree (Read the PDf specs.). When
a PDF is a tree structure, it can be generated using
an XSLT. 
The direct PDF generation might not be possible.
Reason is that there are so many things that you need
to write in the PDF and it's really difficult to
calculate and generate them on the fly.
The easiest way is to generate an intermediate XML,
that has a virtual representation of PDF. Say a
RECTANGLE tag will represent (x, y, height, width) a
rectangle of PDF, a LINE tag will represent (x,y) a
line etc. A standard XSL that will parse the
intermediate XML will do the following 2 things
- Write the common code required for the PDF.
- Write the code of PDF objects like Rectangle, line
etc.

Your XML + XSL --> Intermediate XML + Standard XSL -->
PDF




--- Erik Beijnoff <erik@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I've been searching the net but haven't found any
> answer to my question,
> propably beacuse it's a bit difficult to formulate
> at Google. :)
> 
> Are there any tools to generate PDF forms
> dynamically from an XML template?
> Afaik you can only generate PDF text layout with
> XSLT and XSL-FO, no forms
> generation.
> 
> Alternatives? Prefferably in Java, but anything will
> do.
> 
> /Erik Beijnoff
> 
> erik@xxxxxxxxxxxx
> erik@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> 
> 
> 
>  XSL-List info and archive: 
> http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
> 


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