Trying to figure out the best way to have a templated brochure that creates to PDF. If there is a template that has a text area and an image area, that template is defined already, then at publish time, get the user values, and plug them into the areas and publish as either high-res or low-res. Is this a InDesign server implementation only?
A:
Prince XML can build PDFs from HTML+CSS templates, which is not unique but what differentiates Prince for me is the robustness and quality of the output. For one thing they support CSS 2.1 selectors (and a number of CSS3 selectors) and their rendering engine has passed by Acid2 test. It is commercial and not cheap but is a very capable product. IIRC I think Google even uses it for some things (not 100% sure about that though).
It has interfaces for many languages (PHP, Java, .Net, etc).
cletus
2009-03-24 01:54:38