pdf generation - any alternative to OpenOffice?

[vycitalr]

Hallo,
I am a bit disappointed with the quality of PDF's generated by OpenOffice. I do a lot of ms-word to PDF transformation in alfresco but the result is not satisfying - documents converted by native adobe tools are much nicer. Are there any alternatives to OpenOffice as a PDF-convertor? Any integration with some other pdf-tools?

Thanks for any suggestions.

[hbf]

I am interested in this as well.

Two related things I need are:

1. Downsample PDFs (reduce resolution of embedded images, for scanned documents, for instance)
2. HTML-to-PDF conversion: given a link to a website, create a PDF from it.

I have not found satisfying tools yet.

Thanks for any pointers,
Kaspar

[janco]

Hi hbf,

did you find something that helped you? Any html 2 pdf we can use?

Thanks

Jan

[carlosmiguens]

There are many alternative tools out there that do this. Although I don't know any which are 1) open source and 2) integrated with Alfresco.

We have used AutoBahn DX in the past with good results - it does all the things you have asked for. We have not written an integration between this tool and Alfresco (although we have integrated with with other document mangement systems and don't belive tis to be hard). It is not open source, but it's not expensive IMHO.

Best Regards

[vinuraga]

Hi,

you can use itext-Api to genrate the pdf instead of using open-office,
itext-api has got many functions you can do many things for generating  documents.

Regards
Vinod

[jpfi]

Hi,
As far as i know is iText an API to generate PDF and not to transform documents to pdf.
It seems that OpenOffice is the best Open Source approach doing pdf transformation, but several toher properitary ecm systems using other pdf transformation mechanismn (e.g. http://www.emc.com/collateral/software/data-sheet/h3084-cts-ds.pdf)
Perhaps, you should look how they solve this problem and implement such a feature in Alfresco.
Cheers, Jan