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PDF creation on the Web

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by merrimac

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Is it possible to create a PDF on the fly on the Web based on input entered by the user on an HTML form? What software needs to be running on the server to allow this to happen? How is the PDF creation software invoked and how is the file containing the desired document text "delivered" to the software? Thanks for any help you can provide!

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by reitzen

We use ActivePDF (http://www.activepdf.com/) on our intranet and extranet portals. You can dynamically create PDFs on the fly from HTML or several different document types. You can also create a PDF template, allow the user to complete an HTML form, and then "fill-in the blanks" on the PDF template and present the user with a completed document.

A low/no cost option is HTML2PDF (http://html2pdf.seven49.net/). We used this for a long time but outgrew its capabilities when we needed to staple several PDF files together.

by per

You can use several tech's to solve this problem. It depends on your server environment and application. I have used apache+php and an PDFLib plugin for php with great luck. Later on we made a big XML application using XSL:FO to transform into PDF on the fly. Checkout http://xml.apache.org/ and this for starters http://xml.apache.org/fop/ . Also check out Saxon, a great XSLT-transformer, http://saxon.sourceforge.net/. There are also more expensive approaches using Adobe Acrobat servercomponents. Good luck on this. You can find tons of articles around on this subject.

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