[xep-support] How to generate PDF from XEPOUT files?

[Williams, Allan Derrick]

Hi-

I'm new to RenderX and I apologize if I am asking something that has been rehashed many times, I may have overlooked the answer from the archives. Pointers to resolved answers gratefully accepted!

My problem is that I need to make enormous PDFs in the tens of thousands of pages, possibly more in Java. (The 'why' is out of my hands. I'm only tasked with the 'how').

I found this document that was bang on to helping me solve my problem:

http://renderx.net/documents/RenderX_Large_Reports_Formatting.pdf

The steps this document outlines are roughly this:

1) Transform your document: XML+XSL -> XSL:FO piecemeal (for example, 100 pages per file)
2) Format your document: XSL:FO -> XEPOUT  (merge the XEPOUT files as detailed in document)
3) Generate your pdf files:  XEPOUT -> PDF  (memory efficient this way)


I've accomplished steps 1 and 2, but I'm stuck at #3. The above document doesn't really get very technically detailed (basically says 'this exercise is left to the reader', etc).

Here's how I did Steps 1 and 2 (Java code fragment):

 StreamSource myConfigSource = 
    new StreamSource(new File("D:\\derrick\\renderxx\\xep.xml"));
 StreamSource myInputSource = 
    new StreamSource(new File("D:\\derrick\\renderxx\\C2Big_1.xml"));
 StreamSource myStyleSource = 
    new StreamSource(new File("D:\\derrick\\renderxx\\C2.xsl"));
		
 FormatterImpl myFormat = new FormatterImpl(myConfigSource);
 FOTransformer  myTransformer = 
      new FOTransformer(myStyleSource,myFormat,new DefaultLogger());
 FileOutputStream	myOutput = 
      new FileOutputStream(new File("D:\\derrick\\renderxx\\C2.xep"));
 FOTarget myTarget = 
      new FOTarget(myOutput, "xep"); 

 myTransformer.transform(myInputSource, myTarget);

This works great, I get the C2.xep file, but for the life of me I can't figure out the code to go from XEPOUT->PDF in a similar way as above. The FOTarget class seems to only want to deal with XSL:FO files. I guess there is a really good reason why FOTransformer has the prefix 'FO', but still.

Is there a class I can use to transform XEPOUT to PDF, similar to the above code fragment?

Note: I am not completely stuck on #3, I was able to accomplish the XEPOUT->PDF step this way:

	
String parameters[]={"-DCONFIG=D:\\derrick\\renderxx\\xep.xml",
                     "-xep","D:\\derrick\\renderxx\\C2.xep",
                      "-pdf","D:\\derrick\\renderxx\\C2.pdf"};

XSLDriver.main(parameters);


However I've found XSLDriver to be clumsy - it calls System.exit(), which is a nuisance if you're writing an always-on application like a web service. Your code terminates when you call XSLDriver, never mind that you have other things to do after XSLDriver's done. I guess I could just kick off another process calling XSLDriver but surely there is a better way. I really like the FOTransformer class because I can stream data from various sources. XSLDriver deals only with physical files - somewhat inconvenient in my application.

Thanks very much for reading this far - I hope I didn't go overly long and truly appreciate any help!

-Derrick





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