Creating PDF Invoices - Are there any templating solutions? [closed]

Answer 1

OK, a search of Google Code projects turned up Simple Invoices, which is awesome and well maintained.

Answer 2

The normal way is to install (La)TeX (probably already on the linux box) and run pdflatex to get the pdfs. You can also use Apache FOP, if you prefer xslt and xsl-fo.

If the number of invoices to create is low you might want to use open-office (directly or as a toolkit).

If you want high-precision positioning and low-level access, a low-level pdf library (I don't know if iTextSharp works with mono) might be what you want.

I would try out LaTeX first, because it allows you to get results with the least effort.

Answer 3

We use Reportlab with Python. If you look around there are a load of ready-made forms/invoices/etc.

Answer 4

There are two steps, if i understood correctly:
1) Creation of PDF template with placeholders to populate data programmatically
2) Populating the PDF template programmatically during run time

For #1, OpenOffice allows creation of PDF templates, which can then be populated programmatically. It's good enough to create simple invoices that doesn't probably involve datagrid/table kind of stuff.

For #2, you already have the answers here - iText, iTextSharp.

Hope this helps!