PDF Generation Process

This section provides you with information about the PDF transformation process. The creation of PDF documents uses the Formatting Objects Processor library (FOP).

This page discusses:

See Also
Supported Functionality

Output Format

Output formats are written in XML and contain the following information:

  • A FOP configuration
  • The orientation of the page
  • A set of style sheets

Note: If you need an output format with another page format to follow your corporate visual identity, you have to customize your output format. For example, you can set the default page size or specify where your customized fonts are located in style sheets.

Generation Process

You can interact in the generation process to customize the look of your report file.

An extract of the transformation process is illustrated below:

DocBook Report

Report Generation uses the template and data to generate the DocBook report. DocBook is an XML format.

FO

The FOP library expects a FO as input format. FO is an XML format.

A conversion from DocBook to FO is necessary and consists in an XML tree transformation.

Style Sheet

A default set of XSL style sheets is provided with the app. These style sheets determine a specific look (color, font, font style, etc.).

A style sheet is composed of:



Customization

To define your PDF generation look, follow the tips given below:

Tips:
  • Create your own customization layer instead of modifying the default one. Take as an example the provided customization layer.
  • Avoid modifying the standard style sheets set.

PDF Tables

Some specific styles can be associated with a table, for more information see Chart Styles for Tables.

Useful Information

Some font families such as in the table below are hard-coded into FOP and are directly mapped as follows:

Font families Base-14 font
Helvetica, sans-serif, SansSerif Helvetica
Times, Times Roman, Times-Roman, serif, any Times
Courier, monospace, Monospaced Courier
Symbol Symbol
ZapfDingbats ZapfDingbats

Take care of the characters and font you want to use, because for example not recognized glyphs are replaced by a "#".