Print XML as PDF using PCL

I have an xml file with which i want to print as a PDF using PCL. I am new to PCL. Can i use PCL to get the xml printed in PDF format directly or should i have some intermediate process to create a PDF file and then use PCL to g开发者_高级运维et it printed as PDF?

If you have a xml, there are two ways to recieve PDF file. 1. Create stylesheet for your xml, and use XEP or 2. use just your xml and VisualXSL, which will help you create your pdf for print.

More additional: If you will create your xsl stylsheet, you can format by XEP many type of PDFs, for example PDF/1A, or another levels

Both XEP and VisualXSL are Renderx products(http://www.renderx.com/tools/index.html) and they have trial versions, that you can use:). I have used both products many times, and was satisfied. You can also visit the forum where you can find answers about how to use and how usefull are products described above. http://cooltools.renderx.com

PCL is a printer control language. In other words command bytes you send to a (usually HP) printer which is then converted to ink on a page. This is normally not the way you will generate a PDF since too much information from the original will be lost.

You will normally want to convert your XML to something describing the actual print you want to have. A reasonable choice for this is the XSL-FO XML dialect which, however, is not very nice to do by hand. You can then choose to convert your XML into DocBook XML which in turn has very nice style sheets for converting further on to XSL-FO and other formats.

You can then use Apache FOP to convert XSL-FO into many formats, one being PDF. This allows you to - if FOP gets too small - to replace with one of several commercial XSL_FO rendering engines at a later date.