How to embed table within text and produce pdf output using Perl

Question

I have a requirement to produce letters to send to customers which will contain a report within the letter text. The idea is that the user can create letter paragraphs which can be saved in a database for later use, can be sequenced and can appear either before or after a report. The report will be in table form.

I've looked using PDF::Table and PDF::API2, (both of which are good at what they do), however, both place 'items' on the page in fixed positions and not create a free flowing document.

Unless I've missed something, there is no way to add a table immediately after a paragraph of text or vice versa as page positions are required.

I have thought about using HTML::Template to create the basic letter, then HTML::HTMLDoc to convert to PDF, but would need the ability to insert a page break on change of customer.

What is my best option to achieve the above result please?

Many Thanks

Answer 1

There are only two ways that I've had any success with.

The first is the Apache XML-FOP project. This is a huge, sprawling Java library and specification for turning XML documents into nicely formatted PDFs. I was never good enough with XML stylesheets and transformations to get to grips with this.

The second is to generate openoffice/libreoffice documents and then use a copy of libreoffice in headless mode to convert them to PDFs. This is what I generally end up doing. You may want a minimal X11 installation for fonts etc with Xvfb as a fake display.

For editing the documents I've had success with the OpenOffice-OODoc distribution. HTH.