The Road to Pagination Steve Drucker CEO Fig Leaf Software

Pagination Techniques  Using Cascading Style Sheets  Generating Rich Text Format (RTF) Documents  Generating PDF Documents

Using Cascading Style Sheets  Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.x supports pagination through using the page-break- before: always or page-break-after: always style property  Apply this property to a tag selector for the most robust support  Note: You cannot break a page in the middle of an HTML table. H6 { page-break-before:always; }

Generating MS-Word Docs  Convert HTML to RTF through OLE-Automation of MSWord  Generate RTF Directly through ColdFusion

Invoking MS-Word as a COM Object  Advantages  Easy to Implement  Disadvantages  Not as scalable as generating RTF directly  Not multi-threaded  MS-Word must be loaded on the Server  Security issues  Microsoft KB Article ;EN-US;q ;EN-US;q  Notes  ColdFusion must login under an account name versus a local system account in order to invoke Word as an ole-automation object

Demonstration Invoking Word as COM Object

Generate RTF Directly Through CF  RTF (Rich Text Format) is a markup language similar to HTML.  Unfortunately, RTF is white-space sensitive  MS-Word’s default file format  You can prototype your page in MS- Word, save the file as RTF, and then add tags where appropriate

Generating PDF Documents  What is PDF?  What business problems does PDF solve?  Free Solutions for Creating PDFs  Interfacing with COTS for Creating PDF’s

What is PDF?  PDF (Portable Document Format)  Requires Adobe Acrobat viewer on the client

COTS for PDF Generation  ActivePDF  Adobe Distiller  Others…

Using ActivePDF  On 2/12/02, ActivePDF released SP4 for its product line  This new service pack allows you to convert HTML that includes CSS formatting into PDF  This distribution includes that invokes ActivePDF Server/ActivePDF Web Grabber as COM objects.  ActivePDF actually uses IE 6 as a rendering engine  IE 6 must be loaded on the server  ActivePDF includes a utility that allows it to invoke IE6 under a specified user account.

Summary

Other Resources  ActivePDF  CFCOMET