Thanks! > Most PDF generators out there are not able ... Do you know of any comp...

martin_a · on March 21, 2022

I'm mainly working with two systems.

The one is PDFlib [1] which can easily be accessed via Java and PHP. As a web guy, I'm using PHP obviously. There's some learning curve to it, and you have to take care of lots of stuff by yourself, but the results are pretty good afterwards.

The second are the products from callas, mainly pdfToolbox [2] and pdfChip [3], which are kind of the de facto standard for the printing industry, at least in my Western Europe bubble.

pdfChip is based around the WebKit rendering engine, so you can work with HTML + CSS and convert your document to a PDF file. The pdfChip internals will take care of PDF/X compliance, if you want to.

pdfToolbox and pdfChip both have a steep learning curve, too, but you'll probably find that with any software that is highly specialized.

[1] https://www.pdflib.com/ [2] https://www.callassoftware.com/en/products/pdftoolbox [3] https://www.callassoftware.com/en/products/pdfchip