Hacker News thread on PDF reporting tools

By Vasudev Ram

I saw this thread about PDF reporting tools on Hacker News (HN) today:

Ask HN: What do you use for PDF reports these days?

It was interesting to see that multiple HN users commented saying that they use ReportLab for PDF report creation in Python and like it a lot. I also commented, mentioning my xtopdf PDF generation library, which is also written in Python and builds on top of Reportlab, and provides a subset of ReportLab's functionality, with a somewhat easier interface / API for that subset.


PrinceXML (*), Jasper (Java), JagPDF (C++, Python, Java, C), Flying Saucer (Java), PDFBox (Java), prawn (Ruby), wkhtmltopdf, FPDF/TCPDF (PHP) were some of the other interesting PDF creation tools or libraries mentioned. I have come across many of these tools in my explorations of the PDF creation field (which has been going on for some years, as it is a personal interest of mine, and I've also done some consulting projects that involved PDF generation and PDF text extraction), but still came across some tools new to me, in the HN thread.

(*) A possibly somewhat less-known fact is that Håkon Wium Lie, one of the board members of YesLogic, the company behind PrinceXML is also the original proposer of CSS and the CTO of Opera Software (yes, the company behind the Opera browser).

Wikipedia page about PDF - the Portable Document Format.

PDF became an ISO standard - ISO 32000-1 some years ago.

- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

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xtopdf - an online presentation

By Vasudev Ram

(Updated the post with more links and a few edits; apologies to readers seeing it twice as a result, via feed readers.)

While doing some minor work on my PDF creation toolkit, xtopdf (which is written in Python), I realized that there was no central place where all or most of its features and uses were described, although I have written various articles about xtopdf on this blog and elsewhere on the Internet. I also realized that over a period of time, I have been adding various features or improvements to xtopdf, which some users may not be aware of.

And coincidentally, while browsing the site of a Python Quant, Dr. Yves J. Hilpisch, I saw a presentation there, done using Reveal.js, by Hakim El Hattab. Reveal.js looks very good, BTW. It is a JavaScript tool for creating online presentations. It can be used by creating your slides manually in HTML/JavaScript/CSS, or via an online tool:

There is a companion site, slid.es, where you can create a presentation using Reveal.js. The slid.es site has both free and paid accounts.

So I created a presentation about xtopdf on the slid.es site.

You can view it either here: slid.es/vasudevram/xtopdf, or embedded below:



I hope the xtopdf presentation helps readers and users to get to know xtopdf better, and use it to the fullest. Note: the presentation has hyperlinks; make sure to (right-)click on them to see all the information about xtopdf.

- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

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