InfoMaker provides two ways to save a report or DataStore in Portable Document Format (PDF).
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”.
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).
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.
