[Cialug] Perl performance on RedHat

[David Champion]

Colin Burnett wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 11:39 AM, Dave J. Hala Jr. <dave at 58ghz.net> wrote:
>   
>> I'm using an older version of htmldoc.  Its very,very basic, but its
>> smoking fast.
>>     
>
> Drats.  I recently had to programmatically convert full HTML with full
> CSS support into PDFs and hoped you found a better solution than I
> did.  I dare not speak my solution on the list because it was
> horrifying!
>   
Here's some of the PDF tools I've used recently...

This one is nice, does a lot of form filling stuff, but has limitations 
with the fonts you can use for dynamic content - just the "supported" 
PDF fonts, and it's no longer actively maintained. I tried contacting 
the author and got no response...
http://www.pdfhacks.com/pdftk/

A patched version of this that allows other things like using images / 
pdf's to be inserted into form fields. I emailed back & forth with 
"chick" the author, he's a good guy despite being named "chick", gave me 
some good info. In the end I couldn't use this because it suffers the 
same font limitations as the stock pdftk:
http://www.esnips.com/doc/b4944c59-5dd9-4d62-bd88-401cb7487ad9/pdftk_chicks

This is a commercial product that's similar to pdftk, I ended up using 
it - the system is running PHP on a Windows server, so this works since 
it's an ActiveX control:
http://www.activepdf.com/products/serverproducts/toolkit/

Some of our guys are using this one that does a great job of converting 
HTML to PDF, also an ActiveX control, so limited to Windows servers:
http://www.websupergoo.com/abcpdf-1.htm

-dc