HTML as Page Layout Language

Off and on over the last 6-8 months, I've been working on a project that needs PDF as its final output format. The plan has been to use DocBook and the toolchain attached to it. However, that's been more frustrating than it first looked when it comes to integrating into the whole system I'm designing.

Then, earlier today, someone posted a link to this YouTube video, which demo's the functionality of the Prince engine. That revealed a system for really nice page layout using HTML and CSS (with CSS3 handling the page breaks and other stuff like it was designed to, making Prince the only implementation of CSS3 out there that works as far as I know).

Given how my project is web-based, being able to just keep it all HTML from end to end and still get really nice PDF's out the other end would be a huge benefit. And, given how this project will be commercial and how much time I've already spent trying to do all of the conversions back and forth, even the steep pricetag for a server license will likely be a net bargain.

Fortunately, the version that puts a little logo in the top, right corner of the PDF (only for display, not printing) is free for development/personal use. So, I messed around with that a bit tonight and got a feel for it. There are versions for pretty much all of the platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD, etc.) and integration with code for automatic generation is fairly easy.

Really basic conversion using C# only took 3 lines of code. I just grabbed the normal Windows version, also downloaded the DLL and added that DLL to a basic console app.

Then, these 3 lines work to dump out a PDF of the page in question. I just threw together a quick HTML document to test with a few H1, paragraphs, etc.

IPrince pr = new Prince(@"C:\Program Files\Prince\Engine\bin\prince.exe");
pr.AddStyleSheet(@"C:\Program Files\Prince\Engine\style\xhtml.css");
pr.Convert("demo.html", "demo.pdf");


Pretty easy startup as far as I'm concerned. The video is worth watching, despite being somewhat irritating to watch. Like many presentations to a room full of geeks, there's quite a bit of not seeing the forest for the trees. Lots of people shooting it down by saying, "this is would be REALLY great if it supported my one pet feature" kind of stuff. They got a bit hung up on those little nit-picking details and I wonder how much of their presentation ended up left out as a result.

Based on what I've seen so far, I definitely think it's worth tinkering with a bit more and doing the math on that license fee as part of my project budget.