Generating PDF documents from LISP

Question

I want to generate a technical report from lisp (AllegroCL in my case) and I studied various packages/project to help me do this.

Requirements:

• Need to generate a PDF
• May create an intermediate format like RTF, Restructured TEXT, HTML, Word DOC or Latex
• Need to be flexible to be able to add content throughout my application
• Need to handle Multi-Page, Headers, Footers, Tables, inclusion of Images.

Possibilities:

• cl-pdf and cl-typesetting: I checked this one out and it works for now, but is there a better alternative?
• Some Latex generator, but ???

Question:

Do you know alternatives to easily generate (PDF) reports from lisp. What is the best workflow to go for?

Answer 1

we are using cl-pdf and cl-typesetting for the last 3 years and it has numerous issues... (like its confusion around encodings, or silently not rendering things that don't fit, or...) so, i don't recommend new development based on them.

currently we are in the process of moving all our export mechanisms to open document format. openoffice is all happy with it, and there's a plugin for ms office, too.

there's .fodt, the so called flat open document text format, which is a mere xml file describing a document. generating it is as easy as generating xml files.

you can also make parts of your document read-only with a password (insert a section and mark it read-only and protected by a password. when generating the xml, you can generate random hashes as password...).