[DUG] Open Office automation

[Gary T. Benner]

[Reply]

HI all,

If anyone has had to deal with a bleeding edge area of technology, you will appreciate this current issue I'm having. I relate it here just in case someone has any pearls of wisdom, other than the obvious cynical view. And to also to perhaps warn you off the same path.

The requirement was to provide a distributed system for a client to produce documents that would be delivered as a PDF. The system involves a set of templates, plus user data entered in a browser - using FCKEditor for the data entry.

The app is currently PHP with the view to a service or two in Delphi ( hey gotta keep this on-topic  <g>) to speed some things up. 
When dealing with HTML, PDF, CSS and web standards in general, you really need to be careful as to the version, and degree to with which vendors and products support a standard, and the gap between ideal and reality is often big enough to fit your own torso complete. Ouch!!

I originally used a PHP library to generate the PDF's ... sort of OK, but 20 seconds per page conversion time was unacceptable.

I then managed to get Open Office automated to read the HTML  and then render it to PDF - under one second per page. Sounds great doesn't it?  Well one little teeny bit of incompatibility in the way OO fails to render table row heights properly when converting from HTML to PDF, and the whole thing crashes into ugliness.

There's also issues of CSS support, and the need to create an HTML file with very explicit markup ( ie each table cell !!! ) as opposed to the elegant class structure of CSS.

There a number of sourceforge projects promising to achieve what I wanted, but they all seemed to fizzle out sometime in 2006....  oops.

If anyone is contemplating such a project, be very careful.

cheers

Gary



At 16:05 on 16/07/2009 you wrote 
>To  : gary at benner.co.nz
>CC  : >From: Peter Hyde, peter at webcentre.co.nz
>Content Type: text/plain
>Attached: >
>> I found this which is a good starting point ... since this is exactly
>> what I want to do!!
>>
>> http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=22344
>>
>
>Congrats on finding it!
>
>cheers,
>peter
Ref#: 41006

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