Converting XML to PDF, using styles from XSL

Question

I have following problem: I have a XML file with XSL stylesheet, that is rendering this XML file as neat table in HTML when I load it in web browser. Now I need to make a PDF that is looking EXACTLY like that XSL-styled XML in web browser, without need for making custom FO's for every file. Everything must be done in Java.

Answer 1

I need to make a PDF that is looking EXACTLY like that XSL-styled XML in web browser

Think again about this requirement. Paged media such as PDF and non-paged media such as HTML may only look "close enough", but never "exactly like" each other. This is even more obvious if you consider your HTML being displayed on devices with different screen sizes.

If you relax the above requirement somewhat, you'll probably agree that XSL-FO is the best choice. You definitely do not need to write "custom FO's for every file": write an XSLT just once, and use it on-the-fly to convert your XML to XSL-FO, and then use a rendering engine to process XSL-FO to PDF. Simple.

Answer 2

XSL-FO does sound like exactly what you need. But if that's not an option, first explicitly doing the XSLT transform on the XML in Java and then converting the resulting HTML (which by then is a String/byte array/DOM/whatever you want) to PDF using some additional library would do the trick. There's some libraries that support HTML to PDF, like iText for example. XSLT transformations in Java are really simple. Little code involved there.