The Road to Pagination

Steve DruckerCEO

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.

<STYLE>H6 { page-break-before:always;}</STYLE>

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

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q257757

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<CF_ConvertHTML2Word>

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 <CFOUTPUT> 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

ActivePDFwww.activepdf.com

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 <CF_Html2ActivePDF> 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

ActivePDFwww.activepdf.com

CFCOMETwww.cfcomet.com