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myOffice Email Message
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<span style=
"color:#FF0000 "><b><span style=
"font-family:MS Sans Serif ">[Reply]</span></b></span>
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<span style=
"font-family:MS Sans Serif "><span style=
"color:#000000 ">HI all,</span></span>
<p>
<span style=
"font-family:MS Sans Serif "><span style=
"color:#000000 ">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.</span></span>
<p>
<span style=
"font-family:MS Sans Serif "><span style=
"color:#000000 ">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.</span></span>
<p>
<span style=
"font-family:MS Sans Serif "><span style=
"color:#000000 ">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. </span></span>
<p>
<span style=
"font-family:MS Sans Serif "><span style=
"color:#000000 ">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!!</span></span>
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<span style=
"font-family:MS Sans Serif "><span style=
"color:#000000 ">I originally used a PHP library to generate the PDF's ... sort of OK, but 20 seconds per page conversion time was unacceptable.</span></span>
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<span style=
"font-family:MS Sans Serif "><span style=
"color:#000000 ">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.</span></span>
<p>
<span style=
"font-family:MS Sans Serif "><span style=
"color:#000000 ">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.</span></span>
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<span style=
"font-family:MS Sans Serif "><span style=
"color:#000000 ">There a number of sourceforge projects promising to achieve what I wanted, but they all seemed to fizzle out sometime in 2006.... oops.</span></span>
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<span style=
"font-family:MS Sans Serif "><span style=
"color:#000000 ">If anyone is contemplating such a project, be very careful.</span></span>
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<span style=
"font-family:MS Sans Serif "><span style=
"color:#000000 ">cheers</span></span>
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<span style=
"font-family:MS Sans Serif "><span style=
"color:#000000 ">Gary</span></span>
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<span style=
"font-family:MS Sans Serif "><span style=
"color:#000000 ">A</span><span style=
"color:#FF0000 "><b>t 16:05 on 16/07/2009 you wrote </b></span></span>
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<span style=
"font-family:MS Sans Serif "><span style=
"color:#008000 ">>To : gary@benner.co.nz</span></span>
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<span style=
"font-family:MS Sans Serif "><span style=
"color:#008000 ">>CC : </span></span>
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<span style=
"font-family:MS Sans Serif "><span style=
"color:#008000 ">>From: Peter Hyde, peter@webcentre.co.nz</span></span>
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<span style=
"font-family:MS Sans Serif "><span style=
"color:#008000 ">>Content Type: text/plain</span></span>
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<span style=
"font-family:MS Sans Serif "><span style=
"color:#008000 ">>Attached: </span></span>
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<span style=
"font-family:MS Sans Serif "><span style=
"color:#008000 ">></span></span>
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<span style=
"font-family:MS Sans Serif "><span style=
"color:#008000 ">>> I found this which is a good starting point ... since this is exactly</span></span>
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<span style=
"font-family:MS Sans Serif "><span style=
"color:#008000 ">>> what I want to do!!</span></span>
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<span style=
"font-family:MS Sans Serif "><span style=
"color:#008000 ">>></span></span>
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<span style=
"font-family:MS Sans Serif "><span style=
"color:#008000 ">>> http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=22344</span></span>
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<span style=
"font-family:MS Sans Serif "><span style=
"color:#008000 ">>></span></span>
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<span style=
"font-family:MS Sans Serif "><span style=
"color:#008000 ">></span></span>
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<span style=
"font-family:MS Sans Serif "><span style=
"color:#008000 ">>Congrats on finding it!</span></span>
<p>
<span style=
"font-family:MS Sans Serif "><span style=
"color:#008000 ">></span></span>
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<span style=
"font-family:MS Sans Serif "><span style=
"color:#008000 ">>cheers,</span></span>
<p>
<span style=
"font-family:MS Sans Serif "><span style=
"color:#008000 ">>peter</span></span><p>
<font face=arial size = 1 color = Navy><font color=gray face = "helvetica,verdana,arial" size = 1><br /><br>
<font size=2 color="black">Gary Benner </font><hr /><br>
<a HREF="http://www.semantic.co.nz" style="text-decoration:none; color:blue">Semantic Limited</a> - Online Education, e-Commerce, Software Development & Systems Design<br /><br>
<a HREF="http://www.123.net.nz" style="text-decoration:none; color:blue">123 Internet Limited</a> - Managed Web Hosting, Virtualisation, High Availability Systems & Cluster Technologies<br /><br>
<b>Mob:</b> 021 966 992<br /><br>
<b>DDI:</b> +64 7 543 1206<br /><br>
<b>Email:</b> <a href="mailto:gary@benner.co.nz" >gary@benner.co.nz</a><br /><br>
<b>Skype:</b> garybenner<br /><br>
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