Programmatically generate high quality PDFs

Note: I realize this question has already开发者_开发问答 been asked (with a ruby slant) here: Creating on-demand, print-quality PDFs (preferably in Ruby if feasible). BUT there was no decent answer IMHO.

So as you may have guessed, I am looking to find the best approach to producing HIGH QUALITY, print ready PDF documents programmatically. Our requirements need us to be able to have design documents that define place holders for dynamic content like images and text i.e. some kind of template mechanism.

The suggestion has been to use Adobe's InDesign server, but this seems like an expensive solution not to mention a little overkill for our need.

Are there any alternative, cheaper and more fitting solutions out there? The language of the solution doesn't really matter, just as long as it can be executes on a Windows box.

You can convert XML templates to PDFs with Prince.

Prince is a computer program that converts XML and HTML into PDF documents. Prince can read many XML formats, including XHTML and SVG. Prince formats documents according to style sheets written in CSS.

My suggestion would be to look at XSL-FO or thereabouts...

You create an XML doc that describes what you want and there are various libraries and toolkits (I've used XEP from RenderX) that will convert said XML into PDF.

In real terms what we did was take a large lump of data in XML format, use XSLT - templates in effect - to convert the data to formating objects which XEP renders up into something (a 500 page hotel directory with auto-generated TOC and Index) that has been consumed quite happily by at least three different commercial printers. We did some other smaller documents too from time to time.

Downside with this is that its not even remotely a WYSIWYG solution - you're effectively compiling "source code" to get PDF out the back. Upside is that the base technologies are reasonably generic even if the specific toolkits may be a bit less so.

I have and also know many people that have had much success with ReportLab an open source Python PDF library (http://www.reportlab.org/rl_toolkit.html).

Its extremely easy to use and very quick to get started. So worth trying out.

I don't know why no one has suggested using LaTeX for this. It's an extremely popular open format for document design and not hard to set up a template that you can fill in text or image content. While the reference implementation of LaTeX runs as a standalone program, if that sounds like too many moving parts for you there are wrapper libraries for Python and other languages you can call via an API.

Java language and JasperReports

Java: iText

C#: iTextSharp

depends on what you want to publish, but take a look at Pentaho reporting http://reporting.pentaho.org/

rinohtype is an open-source document processor that is capable of producing high-quality print-ready PDF documents. You can use one of the built-in document templates (book, article) or define your own template. The look of document elements can be configured by means of CSS-like style sheets. The contents of your document can be parsed from reStructuredText or CommonMark files, or you can build the document tree programmatically.

Full disclosure: I am the author of rinohtype.