HTML -> Java Browser -> PDF printer

Alexander Prohorenko alexander.prohorenko at gmail.com
Sun Apr 17 10:04:01 PDT 2005


Hi.

I've got a big site, completely in HTML (JSP) with CSS, etc. I've got a task to automatically generate PDF from any of the URL of this site.

XML-FO - is not an answer. First of all, the way HTML-FO-PDF isn't very short, and besides, it doesn't understand a lot of HTML extensions, as well as CSSes, etc.

HTMLDOC - is not an answer, too. It generates too terrible PDF sometimes, besides, doesn't know what CSS, too.

The last thing which comes into my mind is a server-side HTML printing to PDF printer. The result is the good-looking in most cases. However, there is another problem, is how to do this Java server-side printing of HTML, as HTML should be rendered (!) first (and this should be done automatically!). As for the free software, the only thing which I found is JRex, but it's pretty wet and I believe it'd be bad in the automatic mode running on production server. Unfortunetly, we can't allow commercial software at this moment.

I've also tried HotJava from ports (somebody told me that it can work out for this task) but it doesn't start at all and shows the followin error:

/usr/local/jdk1.1.8/lib/i386/green_threads/libawt.so: Undefined symbol "xmDrawingAreaWidgetClass" (libawt.so)
java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: no awt in shared library path
        at java.lang.Runtime.loadLibrary(Runtime.java)
        at java.lang.System.loadLibrary(System.java)
        at
        at java.awt.Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit(Toolkit.java:399)
        at sunw.hotjava.ui.SplashImage.<init>(SplashFrame.java:75)
        at sunw.hotjava.ui.SplashFrame.<init>(SplashFrame.java:48)
        at sunw.hotjava.Main.main(Main.java:85)

Have anybody tried to solve this problem and had anyone suceeded? I'd be very thankful for any suggestion. 

Thank you! 

-- Alexander Prohorenko.


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