PDF::Create and similar

[Stathis Sideris]

Hello,

In my experience, the best results for multi-format publishing can be 
achieved using DocBook. The whole system is based on writing your 
initial document in the DocBook format (which is XML) and then 
"compiling" to HTML (chunked or single-document), to LaTeX (and from 
there to PDF and PostScript), Windows Help files, JavaHelp files etc etc.

See diagram at:   http://nwalsh.com/docbook/procdiagram/index.html

The compiling is simply XSL transformations based on the provided 
stylesheets. The results where of very high quality in all of the 
formats. Also, minimal XSLT manipulations can allow you to highly 
customise the results.

The only thing I didn't like about DocBook is that it is very verbose as 
a markup language, but I suspect that won't be a huge problem if the 
reports are generated (I was writing "by hand").

Relevant URLs:

http://www.docbook.org/
http://docbook.sourceforge.net/

Stathis

Aaron Trevena wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I was wondering if anybody here had used PDF::Create or similar to
> create PDF reports.
>
> Although I will be providing both HTML and PDF reports I'd rather
> spend the time making the PDF look decent than just convert the HTML,
> so PDF::Create looks the job but I can't find any tutorials or
> articles on it, and it has no ratings on cpan.
>
> The alternatives seem to be template oriented or converting from HTML,
> has anybody used either PDF::Create or the Templating options, I
> *think* would be nice to be able to use TT for PDF generation, has
> anybody tried that?
>
> Cheers,
>
> A.
>