The Road to Pagination

1
The Road to Pagination

• Steve DruckerCEOFig Leaf Software

2
Pagination Techniques

• Using Cascading Style Sheets
• Generating Rich Text Format (RTF) Documents
• Generating PDF Documents

3
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.

ltSTYLEgtH6 page-break-beforealwayslt/STYL
Egt
4
Generating MS-Word Docs

• Convert HTML to RTF through OLE-Automation of
  MSWord
• Generate RTF Directly through ColdFusion

5
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 Articlehttp//support.microsoft.com/
  default.aspx?scidkbEN-USq257757
• Notes
• ColdFusion must login under an account name
  versus a local system account in order to invoke
  Word as an ole-automation object

6
Demonstration

• Invoking Word as COM ObjectltCF_ConvertHTML2Wordgt

7
Generate RTF Directly Through CF

• RTF (Rich Text Format) is a markup language
  similar to HTML.
• Unfortunately, RTF is white-space sensitive
• MS-Words default file format
• You can prototype your page in MS-Word, save the
  file as RTF, and then add ltCFOUTPUTgt tags where
  appropriate

8
Generating PDF Documents

• What is PDF?
• What business problems does PDF solve?
• Free Solutions for Creating PDFs
• Interfacing with COTS for Creating PDFs

9
What is PDF?

• PDF (Portable Document Format)
• Requires Adobe Acrobat viewer on the client

10
COTS for PDF Generation

• ActivePDFwww.activepdf.com
• Adobe Distiller
• Others

11
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 ltCF_Html2ActivePDFgt
  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.

12
Summary
13
Other Resources

• ActivePDFwww.activepdf.com
• CFCOMETwww.cfcomet.com