To those with experience generating documents, particularly PDFs, word documents, spreadsheets etc., what are your thoughts on processes for document generation, keeping in mind our requirements such as:
- Thousands of documents
- Merging
- Content blocks
- Conditional content
I've so far brainstormed the following:
- libraries such as FPDF, TCPDF for PDFs
- creating word documents and converting to PDF
- writing HTML and converting to PDF with libraries such as MPDF
- writing in any format, using a PDF printer, then somehow invoking OCR on the PDF
Any other ideas or thoughts?
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I agree with ray on the general principle that HTML to PDF has lots of bugs to it.
I've used http://www.digitaljunkies.
The least promising method you have is: - writing in any format, using a PDF printer, then somehow invoking OCR on the PDF
the difficulty here is that you need to render it in an app in order to print it, so it's just adding an extra place where things can go wrong.
You asked us for "Any other ideas or thoughts?" and both virmaior and I provided those, based on our experience with document generation and storage. Also asked you for more specifics, but did not get anything back from you. So I do not understand why you would close the question without giving any points to the folks who tried to help you?
Wow... this is like working with children.
As someone with unlimited points, I'm not fussed, I accepted my answer more for the benefit of those who find this question through a EE or google search and want to know how I resolved it.
Vee, no I did not do what you suggested, I read the comments which reiterated my thoughts, and posted my solution which was not mentioned anywhere else in the question.
If you really want the points Ray, take them :S
kebabs,
i too was going to object to the closing, but I held back at the last moment precisely because I don't care about the points. I am confident that for neither Ray nor I are the points really that important.
You asked "what are your thoughts on processes for document generation, keeping in mind our requirements such as" and we did answer that question. Whether your own thoughts were similar or not does not impact the consideration of whether or not we answered the question. We provided you our thoughts as experts in this area...
regards,
virmaior
Business Accounts
Answer for Membership
by: Ray_PaseurPosted on 2009-09-17 at 06:20:58ID: 25355729
Some thought and some experience...
FPDF works great - fast and allows very precise positioning. I have even printed business cards with it!
MS Office 2007 has built-in "save as PDF" capabilities.
HTML-to-PDF is fraught with unpleasant surprises for the unsophisticated client. The usual beginning of the unfortunate conversation starts with, "Why doesn't it look the same way on the page as it does on my laptop?"
On the "thousands of documents, content blocks" front - that sounds like you need a data base.
If you want to give us more specifics, we may be able to offer more specific help. Best, ~Ray