Comparison with other solutions

The high-quality PDF production of Produce & Publish is based on the PrinceXML converter. There are other approaches on the market for generating PDF documents. Please check the pros and cons of those solutions.

Technology Converters Statement
XSL-FO FOP, XINC
  • poor to good results (based on the converter used)
  • results may vary among XSL-FO processors
  • no straight forward way for converting HTML as input format to XSL-FO
  • XSL-FO is not an easy language
  • no styling with CSS possible
  • partly severe problems with tables depending on the XSL-FO processor
  • not very well suited for web-to-print applications where absolute positioning of elements is a mandatory requirement
  • prices range from free (FOP) to very expensive
TeX/LaTeX various TeX implementations
  • very well automatic typesetting capabilities 
  • very good hyphenation support
  • very good support for tables
  • no straight forward way for dealing with XML/HTML input data
  • no suitable for layout-oriented documents
  • no support for absolute positioning and therefore not a candidate for web-to-print applications 
  • limited support for Unicode
  • TeX implementations are usually provided for free
Adobe technology Adobe Indesign (Server)
  • expensive to very expensive (license and support costs)
  • vendor-login
PDF Libraries
  • PDFLib
  • Reportlab
  • FPDF
  • many more
  • low-level PDF libraries give you full control over the PDF generation
  • too low-level and time-consuming for preparing PDF templates
  • a good choice for complex layouts where you need total control over each element of the PDF
  • usually average automatic typesetting quality
  • price tag ranges from free to very expensive
Other open-source PDF converters
  • htmldoc
  • fast but poor PDF quality
  • poor typesetting
  • poor styling capabilities
  • free