Prince XML: Generating High Quality PDFs from HTML + CSS

Google Tech Talks
November, 12 2007

ABSTRACT

Please welcome Håkon Lie and Michael Day, who will be presenting Prince XML.

Prince Overview: Prince is a computer program that converts XML and HTML into PDF documents. Prince can read many XML formats, including XHTML and SVG. Prince formats documents according to style sheets written in CSS.

Dynamic data-driven documents: Prince is an ideal printing component for server-based software such as web applications and database systems. Using Prince, data in XML can easily be converted to PDF documents that can be printed, archived or downloaded over the web.

Electronic publishing: Prince can also be used by authors and publishers to typeset and print documents written in HTML, XHTML or one of the many XML-based document formats. Prince is capable of formatting academic papers, scientific journals, novels, and books with extensive illustrations.

Speaker: Håkon Wium Lie
Håkon Wium Lie, YesLogic Director: Håkon is a web pioneer, having proposed CSS while working with Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1994. Håkon became a devotee when he found that Prince could format his book on CSS (co-authored with Bert Bos) and his PhD thesis. Håkon is a graduate of MIT's Media Lab and is also the CTO of Opera Software.

Speaker: Michael Day
Michael Day, YesLogic CEO: Michael is the system architect for Prince. He has implemented the CSS processing module, which supports many pioneering CSS features including CSS3 Selectors and Paged Media properties. In 2003, he joined the W3C CSS working group as an invited expert.

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[redkard1979]

this great for Infomation Architects and digital librarians

[twebb72]

This is interesting, but projects like iText/iTextSharp seem way more compelling. PDF's themselves support more than what html/css parser can do. For instance, you can fill out a form with them. While I can see a use case for converting html/css to pdf, iText seems more robust with support for reading/writing and direct support of pdf native features.

[Harristar88]

Neat. I'm an X-HTML person, though :) Im 13!

[JY1376]

Lectures

[OghamTheBold]

When I saw the CSS - leader('.') - I thought I'll try that - and I actually tried to highlight the video text; to cut it - needless to say I had to resort to a lead-world typing technique instead

[paulbjensen]

Agreed. Fascinating stuff, especially for a CSS junkie like me.

[DOGBOX2007]

very interesting