Creating PDF Invoices - Are there any templating s

Question

Our company is looking to integrate invoices into a new system we are developing.

We require a solution to create a layout of the invoice and then convert to pdf.

We have considered just laying out the invoice in html/css then converting to pdf. We have also considered using SVG->PDf conversion.

Both of these solutions integrate well into our existing templating language used for our web application.

Historically we have been a Microsoft based business and used Crystal Reports for such a task but we are looking for an open source Linux solution for this project.

Does any one have any suggestions of an approach or technology we could use for such a task?

Answer 1

I use open office on the server and then generate the XML for the document (just unzip the document and hack away)

Answer 2

The normal way is to install (La)TeX (probably already on the linux box) and run pdflatex to get the pdfs. You can also use Apache FOP, if you prefer xslt and xsl-fo.

If the number of invoices to create is low you might want to use open-office (directly or as a toolkit).

If you want high-precision positioning and low-level access, a low-level pdf library (I don't know if iTextSharp works with mono) might be what you want.

I would try out LaTeX first, because it allows you to get results with the least effort.

Answer 3

You might also try using XSL:FO. XSL:FO is a documented standard for describing page layout: http://www.w3.org/TR/xsl/#fo-section.

I've had success on two projects creating documents by creating an XML schema that defines the content of the "PDF". I then use the XSD tool (from Microsoft) to generate a class representing this document. I then map my data into that structure, serialize the populated class to XML, along with an XSL stylesheet that defines how that data should be mapped into FO, and pass it to an FO formatter. For formatters, I have use Alt-Soft's Xml2Pdf with success. There are a few others out there. There are some tools available to help create the XSL to FO stylesheet (i.e. stylusstudio and XmlSpy), but I recommend learning the FO constructs as the tools seem to produce bloated stylesheets. FO is comparable to HTML (where a P tag is a BLOCK tag in FO), but can be tricky. This nice thing about FO, is that some formatter support conversion to other formats, such as Word, HTML, etc.

Other options:

1. iTextSharp (C# port of iText). Just started reading about this. Open source and free. I don't think there is any "templating" supported with this, but I could be wrong about that.

2. SQL Server Reporting Services. Assuming your invoice data is in, or can be put in, a format that can be read by reporting services (SQL Server, Web Service, etc), define the layout in SSRS and then publish to reporting server. Use SSRS Web Services or query parameter execution to execute the report and have it output as PDF.

Answer 4

We have used Jasper Reports before. It's not what you'd call user-friendly, but it will talk directly to your database.

Answer 5

There are several OSS reporting engines (Jasper Reports, Pentaho and BIRT to name three) that you could use in much the same way as you have historically used Crystal Reports. One of the other posters mentions ReportLab, which is an option if you're using Python or can embed a Python runtime in your application.

Answer 6

Probably the most flexible solution is to create XMLs with invoice data and then by using XSLTs transform the, into PDFs, HTMls, whatever...