Although I’m generally an Open Source enthusiast, sometimes you just need something better …

Prince XML – if you need to create lots of PDFs, you probably need this. It converts HTML to PDFs really fast and accurately. They’ve even used it to publish a book. There is an open source alternatives which may suite you: tufat html2pdf – but it isn’t as powerful, is really slow, and takes up a lot of memory. Good for small scale projects. I’ve actually used it quite a bit, but eventually the requirements of my projects grew beyond what could be done with it. (I talked with the devs about sponsoring the changes I needed, but they felt it would be impossible meet my requirements and recommended that I get Prince XML instead.) Prince XML comes as a command line binary, so it’s easy to integrate it with any language. “prince in.html out.pdf” is all it takes.

Chart Director – makes building graphical charts for your website both fun and beautiful. I haven’t really come across any open source alternatives that I cared for. The API is quite nice and includes just about everything I need. It comes with bindings for all common languages.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 at 12:56 pm and is filed under PHP, python. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.