++ to your question. I had almost exactly the same issue to solve last year, and after researching the options I came to the same conclusions. I went back to my customers and asked them to purchase PDFlib in order to proceed with the project. They declined, so the project died an early death

First off, why PDF? Because only PDF can be reliably displayed AND PRINTED on multiple OS, browsers and hardware. It would be nice if there was another way...

The ideas and architecture behind PDFlib and PDF::Template are key; that is that you can create a template PDF that can be filled in at run time by the perl program. PDFlib software allowed a number of important services.

* A template editor plug-in for Adobe Acrobat. This allowed templates to be created that overlayed existing PDFs. This was important because it allowed any program to make the layout of the form then "print" the form to pdf from which the template could then be constructed. The template editor was an easy enough GUI to be used by anyone: Anyone could maintain/make the templates.

* A C-based perl Module that allowed templates to be populated by the perl program. The API was very nicely designed, very simple and robust.

Is it worth it to roll your own? I would anwser yes! It would be great to have similiar or identical functionality so that one could output to a template that would result in an output file that was identically printable across any platform. I would contribute time to such an open source project.

Cheers

Fred Kleindenst
freddo411@eudoramail.com

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Nothing is too wonderful to be true
-- Michael Faraday