The Road to Pagination Steve Drucker CEO Fig

The Road to Pagination Steve Drucker CEO Fig Leaf Software

Pagination Techniques Ó Using Cascading Style Sheets Ó Generating Rich Text Format (RTF) Documents Ó Generating PDF Documents

Using Cascading Style Sheets Ó Microsoft Internet Explorer 5. x supports pagination through using the page-breakbefore: always or page-break-after: always style property Ó Apply this property to a tag selector for the most robust support Ó Note: You cannot break a page in the middle of an HTML table. <STYLE> H 6 { page-break-before: always; } </STYLE>

Generating MS-Word Docs Ó Convert HTML to RTF through OLE-Automation of MSWord Ó Generate RTF Directly through Cold. Fusion

Invoking MS-Word as a COM Object Ó Advantages ú Easy to Implement Ó Disadvantages ú Not as scalable as generating RTF directly ú Not multi-threaded ú MS-Word must be loaded on the Server ú Security issues ú Microsoft KB Article http: //support. microsoft. com/default. aspx? scid=kb ; EN-US; q 257757 Ó Notes ú Cold. Fusion 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_Convert. HTML 2 Word>

Generate RTF Directly Through CF Ó RTF (Rich Text Format) is a markup language similar to HTML. Ó Unfortunately, RTF is white-space sensitive Ó MS-Word’s default file format Ó You can prototype your page in MSWord, save the file as RTF, and then add <CFOUTPUT> tags where appropriate

Generating PDF Documents Ó What is PDF? Ó What business problems does PDF solve? Ó Free Solutions for Creating PDFs Ó Interfacing with COTS for Creating PDF’s

What is PDF? Ó PDF (Portable Document Format) Ó Requires Adobe Acrobat viewer on the client

COTS for PDF Generation Ó Active. PDF www. activepdf. com Ó Adobe Distiller Ó Others…

Using Active. PDF Ó On 2/12/02, Active. PDF released SP 4 for its product line Ó This new service pack allows you to convert HTML that includes CSS formatting into PDF Ó This distribution includes <CF_Html 2 Active. PDF> that invokes Active. PDF Server/Active. PDF Web Grabber as COM objects. Ó Active. PDF actually uses IE 6 as a rendering engine Ó IE 6 must be loaded on the server Ó Active. PDF includes a utility that allows it to invoke IE 6 under a specified user account.

Summary

Other Resources Ó Active. PDF www. activepdf. com Ó CFCOMET www. cfcomet. com