Prince XML

• http://princexml.com/

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.

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.

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.

There are some impressive samples of what Prince XML does at http://princexml.com/samples/ (see for example the Wikipedia "Norway" sample) and some user comments even mentioning how they can now skip docbook / xsltproc and other utilities and work directly with css, so the technology definitely sounds rather promising.

A server license is currently USD 3800 so probably most installations will not be able to afford to utilize this software server side, but a TWiki plugin could perhaps be made to work in such a way that the formatting could be deferred to / done on the client side also (Prince XML has a free Personal license for interactive use on a single computer).

-- Contributors: SteffenPoulsen - 02 Aug 2008

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