[erlang-questions] PDF reports from Mnesia: Erlguten and XMerL?

[Jayson Vantuyl]

To throw one more hack on the pile, I've found Apache FOP (http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/ 
) to be pretty decent.

Basically, you generate XSL-FO (originally the output format for  
XSLT).  It can easily create PDFs reproducibly, and is arguably easier  
to deploy that TeX for that purpose.  Its big wins are that it  
complies with a fairly unambiguous standard, is rock-solid, doesn't  
require a windowing system, and is maintained.  About the only  
drawback is that the stable version only processes one document per  
invocation (which can be quite slow).  It's pretty trivial to wrap it  
in some Java, if you have the stomach for it.

Of course, you probably still don't enjoy generating XML in Erlang,  
but you might be able to write your templates in some sort of  
intermediate template language.  If I was doing this today, I'd  
probably suggest Mustache (http://github.com/defunkt/mustache).

Good luck!

On Oct 8, 2009, at 11:13 PM, Nina Alex Juliadotter wrote:

> Hi all
>
> I'm writing an app with a Mnesia backend that needs to generate PDF
> files from the data and was wondering if anyone had any tips on how to
> go about doing this.
>
> I've come across Erlguten for PDF generation, which takes XML files as
> input. So, to use Mnesia data, I take it I could use XMerL to
> transform it into XML? The only trouble is that both these projects
> seem rather idle and alpha like, the last time I've seen any
> discussions was in 2004 and the source I found is from 2003. Is anyone
> generating PDF files in their Erlang app, and in that case what
> libraries are you using?
>
> Thanks heaps
> Nina
>
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-- 
Jayson Vantuyl
kagato@REDACTED