Which is the Best commercial xsl fo engine ?

Question

We have been using apache's fop 0.95 as our xsl fo engine. We basically use fop 0.95 to generate pdf documents from xml files. During the run of time we have felt that it would be better by far if we could buy some other commercial xsl fo engine that supports:

1. pdf watermark image
2. support to unicode [like arabic, russian, dutch, greek etc.]

and so on. Due to lack of finer support to unicode, no support to watermark etc. in fop0.95, we have decided to go commercial. Please suggest me which is the best xsl fo engine.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Antenna House and renderX. are the leaders in the XSL-FO space. They have great tools and overall support/implementation for the XSL-FO specification.

You may also consider Ibex pdf creator. It is a really good XSL-FO engine with Java and .NET implementations. I have used their Java implementation and it did pretty much everything we needed and was performant. Their licensing model is really good, especially if you are building clients that need XSL-FO processing. You pay a per-developer fee, not a per-client distribution.

Answer 2

You also have to consider Ecrion's engine. It is the fastest out there - they even publish benchmarks on their web site which no one else does. And they have a very good Visual Designer that is very handy if you don't want to develop templates by hand. If your data also resides in multiple XML files, databases, web services and so on, the formatter can use a pretty cool data integration platform which is free.

Answer 3

Hi,

Our experience with Antenna House is really good. Although the pricing is quite tough, there are several very good points (in our experience):

• Very stable software (we are still running the original software we purchased, without any patches needed
• they deliver new versions in time
• programming against the interface is just a few lines of code

Regarding Unicode, we use it for our pdf generation and have no problems so far. Our solution runs in over 40 countries, including Russia, China, Bulgaria etc.

Hope this helps, good luck! Martijn

Answer 4

We are quite happy with using Altsoft Xml2PDF Very fast engine, i think even the fastest one.

"
pdf watermark image
support to unicode [like arabic, russian, dutch, greek etc.]
" There should not be any problems with this.

Hope that info will help you.

Sammy_aus

Answer 5

Hi,

Did you try RenderX products? Such as XEP, XEPWin or VisualXSL. They support watermarking and Unicode support (Arabic, Thai...)

Hope this will help you.