What's been the best way to create PDF's?

Johnny

This *could* also belong in templating - but anyways.....

Started in this thread

We're using Apache FOP to create PDF's through TeamSite.
We have quite detailed PDF's that are produced (9+ pages - lots of graphics) and if more than a couple generation's are running at the same time, the memory tips over on our server. What's more, the generation takes 3+ minutes.

We're thinking of creating some sort of daemon process that acts as a PDF server to serialize the creation of PDF's which should help manage the memory usage - is it worth it?... should we start looking at commercial products?.. Is there anything that's open source out there that might manage multiple PDF generation? What about reducing the time it takes to create the PDF?

How else could we create PDF's in an effective way? I've heard of iText which is a java API, but a programatic interface might be harder to style a PDF - though I guess it should be faster?..

I know some sort of Apache FOP forum might help out, but so far I haven't found any real world info.

How is everyone else creating PDF's??



John Cuiuli

nipper

Yea I have used FOP, but that was for a demo when I was selling TS. Worked well but I never really worried about the performance as I used fairly small pages.
When you say generation takes 3 minutes, is that for a 9 page doc ? How about in a WF ?