Specifications

CHAPTER 6 Enhancing Reports
Users Guide 209
The rest of this section provides more information about saving data in PDF,
HTML, and PSR formats.
For more information about saving data as XML, see Chapter 12, “Exporting
and Importing XML Data.”
Saving the data as PDF
InfoMaker provides two ways to save a report or DataStore in Portable
Document Format (PDF).
Using Ghostscript
By default, when you select File>Save Rows As and select PDF as the file type,
the data is printed to a PostScript file and automatically distilled to PDF using
Ghostscript. This option provides a robust solution that can save most types of
reports.
Installing Ghostscript and PostScript drivers
For licensing reasons, Ghostscript and the PostScript drivers required to use the
distill method are not installed with InfoMaker. You (and your users) must
download and install them before you can use this technique. See “System
requirements for the distill method” on page 210.
Using XSL-FO and
Java printing
Building on the ability to save data as XML, InfoMaker can also save the
report’s data and presentation to PDF by generating XSL Formatting Objects
(XSL-FO). This option provides a platform-independent solution by rendering
the report using a Java process rather than the Microsoft GDI. It also offers the
possibility of customizing the PDF file at the XSL-FO stage.
The XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) W3C Recommendation has two
parts, XSLT and XSL-FO. XSLT provides the transformation typically used to
present XML documents as HTML in a browser. XSL-FO provides extensive
formatting capabilities that are not dependent on the output format.
For more information about XSL, see the latest version of the
Extensible
Stylesheet Language (XSL) at http://www.w3.org/TR/xsl/
.
Limitations
The Ghostscript method currently does not support OLE and RichText reports.
The XSL-FO method currently does not support OLE, RichText, graph, and
composite reports.