Hi Folks,

I'm working on a project which requires nice formatted reports generated from database output. One possible way to go is to generate PDF files, and I've done a fair bit of research and beginning code testing to figure out the best way to go. I need a bit of advice on one particular thing.

One module that I like the best (or at least I like the idea best) is called PDF::Template. It uses an XML template to separate the formatting from the data. I like this approach a lot. The one fatal flaw, however (for me, not necessarily for others) is that it requires the totally not free software PDFLib. (Apparently, you used to be able to download it for free, but that is no longer the case, the free version puts a demo watermark on all PDFs generated. In any event, I'm a totally open source gal, so any software I use in my applications has to be open source.) However, it looks fairly straightforward, and I was thinking of writing a version that used PDF::API2, which looks like a really nice PDF creation module.

So my question is: is it worth doing this? Has anyone done something similar that I couldn't find? Based on my research, I'm pretty clear that PDF generation via PDF::API2 is the way I want to go (as opposed to using the older PDF::Create, or a combination of html2ps, etc.), but I'm wondering whether it's worth going whole hog and recreating this module (or a similar idea) or just writing my own little thing.

Thanks, and any suggestions/ideas/flogging is welcome.

In reply to PDF generation by michellem

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