Web-To-Print - What technology should I explore? Web-Content -> drag & drop to Templates -> PDF

Question

I'm discussing some software design issues with a potential client and the idea of Web-to-Print technology has come up.

We need users to be able to drag images from an image library to various regions defined by a template. Example: Images may go in box A, B, or C and text may go in boxes D or E. These templates would be setup

Boxes A through E would be defined inside a template by administrators using some sort of editor.

These templates would serve as a mapping from web-content to a PDF.

Once users drag images and insert text in the appropriate regions of the template, the result will be converted into a PDF.

Is this feasible these days with jquery & asp.net? That would be nice.

If not, what would be the ideal solution?

Answer 1

Not sure about generating PDF's from jquery or ASP.net, but if I had the same problem, I would create an XML document and then use XSL Formating Objects (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSL_Formatting_Objects) to create the PDF.

Perhaps that's overkill. I've used this method to render academic papers from complex XML documents.