X4 Produktdokumentation
X4 Produktdokumentation
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PDF Creator


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PDF Creator: Transforms an input XML document by means of an XSLT stylesheet into an XSL-FO document. In the same process action, this document is converted into a page-oriented output document using the XSL-FO processor Apache FOP 1.0. Possible output formats for Reports are PDF, PDF/A, and PostScript.


Properties

Document

Path to the linked file in the repository

Component Parameters

Set component parameters, see Using Component Parameters

Report type

Output format of the report
Possible values:

  • PDF: PDF document (Portable Document Format)

  • PDF/A: PDF document in the archiving format PDF/A-1b according to ISO 19005-1

  • PS: PostScript file

Using the PDF/A option, Apache FOP 1.0 requires specifying a font (using attribute font-family) for each text block of within the FO document. In addition, all used fonts must be available on the system during PDF/A generation.


Creating reports with XSL-FO

The PDF Creator component allows to dynamically generate documents for print (reports) during process runtime. A report is a specific XSL mapping that transforms input XML data and outputs an XML document with XSL-FO syntax. The X4 BPMS will convert the generated XSL-FO document automatically into the specified output format and will hand it over to the next process step.

The X4 BPMS uses Apache FOP as XSL-FO processor to process reports.

The XSL-FO element <fo:external-graphic src="url('path/to/file.png')"> allows to embed graphic files (e.g., GIF, JPEG, PNG, SVG) into your report document. You can also specify the graphics path using xstore:/ URLs to reference files from the X4 repository, e.g.:

<fo:external-graphic src="url('xstore://Project/Folder/File.png')" 
    content-width="10mm" content-height="10mm"/>

The optional attributes content-width and content-height specify the graphic's width and height in the output document.

As an alternative, you can embed binary graphic files into the report as Base64-encoded string, see also Base64 Converter:

<fo:external-graphic src="url(data:;base64,Base64-kodierte Bilddaten)"/>

The source code of SVG images can also be embedded directly into the report, e.g.:

<fo:instream-foreign-object>
   <svg:svg xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" 
    height="1mm" width="40mm">
    <svg:line y1="0" y2="0" x1="0" x2="40mm"
     style="stroke:#0000FF;stroke-width:0.5pt" />
   </svg:svg>
</fo:instream-foreign-object>

Note that all SVG elements must use the namespace svg:.


Example

The following example is a very simple XSL-FO document:

<fo:root xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format">  
  <fo:layout-master-set> 
    <fo:simple-page-master master-name="simple" page-height="29.7cm" 
    page-width="21cm" margin-left="2.5cm" margin-right="2.5cm"> 
      <fo:region-body margin-top="3cm"/> 
    </fo:simple-page-master> 
  </fo:layout-master-set>  
  <fo:page-sequence master-reference="simple"> 
    <fo:flow flow-name="xsl-region-body"> 
      <fo:block>Hello World</fo:block> 
    </fo:flow> 
  </fo:page-sequence> 
</fo:root>


For more information on hyphenation, see https://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/2.5/hyphenation.html.