WordML XML to PDF

[Tom Frey]

Hi,

is there any solution available for transforming WordML XML files to PDF on
server requests.
Here is basically what I'm looking for:
We have like 15 different types of contracts that have to be filled
dynamically with data (names, addresse, etc.). These contracts are up to 30
pages long. Right now they are all in .doc format and we have to fill in the
data by hand.

However, we want an solution that gives us the possibility that a user can
enter his data online and the contract is generated dynamically.

I know that there would be the solution to use XML-FO and FOP the achieve
what we want. But it's pain in the ass to write XSLT's for all the
contracts. So, is there an easier solution to transform WordML XML's into
PDF?
btw the reason why i want to use WordML XML's is that i can easily fetch the
contract from a database, query what has to be changed, fill in data and
transform into a PDF

regards,

Tom Frey

 

[Eoin Campbell]

WordML is not even released yet, so it seems strange to choose it for
your solution. Disregarding XML for a moment, if you stored your contracts
in RTF, it would be easy to insert placeholders for dynamic information
in the documents and programmatically replace them with real data,
using Perl for example. You could use Words mucky HTML markup instead of
RTF, but you couldn't use XSLT to process it, as it is not well-formed.

Alternatively, you could write a VB application or VBA macro to do a
similar job.

Using an XML-based approach is probably the most complex and expensive
at the moment.If you want it, you could do a simple clean-up
of the Word-HTML output to make it well-formed, as Word will import
well-formed XML with all the style information and metadata intact
(cf. http://www.xmlw.ie/aboutxml/xml2word/index.htm).

Then your process would look like this:
1. Store template document in XML, with placeholders inserted
2. Gather data from database (or web form)
3. Insert data into template using XSLT
4. Use DocServer to convert document to HTML using Word
(cf. DocServer at http://www.fi.muni.cz/~adelton/perl/)
5. Use HTML2FO/FOP to convert HTML document to PDF
(cf. http://sourceforge.net/projects/html2fo/)