What open file format comes to your mind when you have to produce mass of personalized electronic documents in enterprise system?
I have reviewing pragmatic solutions for given requirements:
PDF seems good choice, it is well distributed format and produces nice print outs. I've tried it and it worked quite well. The cons of that solution popped out during batch processing and were: slow process of generating final PDF and bigger files included containing additional font data (national character issues - no problems with standard fonts).
Another approach was using XHTML as final format with ability to print from web browser. That needs more attention on formatting and automatic flow, but it makes good prints also.
Users can print documents using both formats without problems. XHTML was faster to produce and worked with standard system fonts, so files were in most cases smaller than their PDF counterparts.
That was scenario for paper dominated document flow process. Electronic document processing requirements need also easy and automatic access to important data in document content. The best standard for that seems XML containing structured data. That plus XSLT transformation for description of form view, may be used to produce printable XHTML or PDF (with help of FOP (Formatting Objects Processor)).
New document formats like ODF are based on similar ideas so future lays somewhere here, just new solutions need more adoption.
I have reviewing pragmatic solutions for given requirements:
- ready for batch print out and producing quite good prints on customer's printers
- keeping documents in electronic version for evidence (content cannot be changed)- the bussiness process is paper based
- have customizable templates (text, formatting, tables)
- total cost of process should be optimized (including printing by customer issues)
PDF seems good choice, it is well distributed format and produces nice print outs. I've tried it and it worked quite well. The cons of that solution popped out during batch processing and were: slow process of generating final PDF and bigger files included containing additional font data (national character issues - no problems with standard fonts).
Another approach was using XHTML as final format with ability to print from web browser. That needs more attention on formatting and automatic flow, but it makes good prints also.
Users can print documents using both formats without problems. XHTML was faster to produce and worked with standard system fonts, so files were in most cases smaller than their PDF counterparts.
That was scenario for paper dominated document flow process. Electronic document processing requirements need also easy and automatic access to important data in document content. The best standard for that seems XML containing structured data. That plus XSLT transformation for description of form view, may be used to produce printable XHTML or PDF (with help of FOP (Formatting Objects Processor)).
New document formats like ODF are based on similar ideas so future lays somewhere here, just new solutions need more adoption.
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