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We have been using apache's fop 0.95 as our xsl fo engine. We basically use fop 0.95 to generate pdf documents from xml files. During the run of time we have felt that it would be better by far if we could buy some other commercial xsl fo engine that supports:

  1. pdf watermark image
  2. support to unicode [like arabic, russian, dutch, greek etc.]

and so on. Due to lack of finer support to unicode, no support to watermark etc. in fop0.95, we have decided to go commercial. Please suggest me which is the best xsl fo engine.

Thanks.

Sangam Uprety
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  • Does it have to be XSL-FO? Or are other alternatives that meet your requirements and are equally fast (and easier) an alternative? – David Thielen Jun 06 '12 at 21:53

5 Answers5

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Antenna House and renderX. are the leaders in the XSL-FO space. They have great tools and overall support/implementation for the XSL-FO specification.

You may also consider Ibex pdf creator. It is a really good XSL-FO engine with Java and .NET implementations. I have used their Java implementation and it did pretty much everything we needed and was performant. Their licensing model is really good, especially if you are building clients that need XSL-FO processing. You pay a per-developer fee, not a per-client distribution.

Mads Hansen
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  • I have tried antenna house and renderx. RenderX does not support unicode by default. But antenna house formatter displayed proper characters if I had installed the ttf. – Sangam Uprety Jan 20 '10 at 12:51
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    We digged into renderx and invoked the command line. Since we are familiar with apache, it wasn't difficult to integrate unicode true type font with renderx. I hope this one will be our choice. – Sangam Uprety Jan 28 '10 at 11:16
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You also have to consider Ecrion's engine. It is the fastest out there - they even publish benchmarks on their web site which no one else does. And they have a very good Visual Designer that is very handy if you don't want to develop templates by hand. If your data also resides in multiple XML files, databases, web services and so on, the formatter can use a pretty cool data integration platform which is free.

Peter Stroll
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  • Ecrion didn't support unicode by default. Any idea? – Sangam Uprety Jan 20 '10 at 12:53
  • You have to use a Unicode font. Like "Arial Unicode MS" or "MS Mincho" (for chinese characters). – Peter Stroll Jan 20 '10 at 15:59
  • I will look into unicode font embedding. Further, it shows that only fo output can be achieved using ecrion in command line mode. But we have xml and xsl, and want pdf directly. Should I use other engine to get pdf from command line? – Sangam Uprety Jan 28 '10 at 06:06
  • The command line can also take a XML and XSL stylesheet or a XFD (Designer template) as well; try: `URender.NET.exe "..\XML Samples\Template Samples\cdcatalog.xml" -parameters:template="..\XML Samples\Template Samples\CdCatalog.xfd"` – Peter Stroll Jan 29 '10 at 00:52
  • @ Peter Sangam was talking about xsl not xfd ,is some thing like render.exe -xml in.xml -xsl in.xsl -pdf out.pdf possible in ecrion? – Thunder Mar 04 '10 at 10:43
  • Yes. You can use a XSL as well. BTW, a XFD can be converted to XSL in the designer. Or you can do this in your code using a free component from their web site. – Peter Stroll Mar 05 '10 at 05:33
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Did you try RenderX products? Such as XEP, XEPWin or VisualXSL. They support watermarking and Unicode support (Arabic, Thai...)

Hope this will help you.

Tigran
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Our experience with Antenna House is really good. Although the pricing is quite tough, there are several very good points (in our experience):

  • Very stable software (we are still running the original software we purchased, without any patches needed
  • they deliver new versions in time
  • programming against the interface is just a few lines of code

Regarding Unicode, we use it for our pdf generation and have no problems so far. Our solution runs in over 40 countries, including Russia, China, Bulgaria etc.

Hope this helps, good luck! Martijn

Martijn
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  • It seems that we cannot get pdf output from command line mode of antenna house, if we don't pass the layout file(foo.rxl file). The rxl file itself is designed using their xml designer software. How did you manage using antenna house from command line? – Sangam Uprety Jan 28 '10 at 06:09
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We are quite happy with using Altsoft Xml2PDF Very fast engine, i think even the fastest one.

"
pdf watermark image
support to unicode [like arabic, russian, dutch, greek etc.]
" There should not be any problems with this.

Hope that info will help you.

Sammy_aus

user247991
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