Looking for a convertor from HTML to PDF with J2SE

Question

Hi all,
My current project would generate some XML data and display it on the web. Needless to say I have to prepare a matching set of XSL to transform the XML into HTML. I got that part done.
However, my project also requires a PDF output of the same XML data for download. Well, I planned to do the XSL-fo stuff on it as well. But at some point the client thought since new kind of XML data may be added and it's too troublesome to maintain 2 sets of XSLs, they are requesting a converter to translate HTML directly into PDF now.
I've searched the web, and found a few converter. But all of them are written in C and can't be embeded directly into my Java code. And my servlet might not have rights to call an external program on the production machine.
I would appreciate very much if anyone can share their experience on similar issue, using a Java component to convert HTML into PDF. Suggestion of commercial products or open source freeware are all welcome.
Thank you very much.

Answer 1

HTML to PDF with Java, using OpenOffice.org - example here: [http://www.dancrintea.ro/html-to-pdf/|http://www.dancrintea.ro/html-to-pdf/]
You can use OpenOffice.org, running as a server and command it remotely for document convertion.
Besides HTML to PDF, there are also possible other convertions:
doc --> pdf, html, txt, rtf
xls --> pdf, html, csv
ppt --> pdf, swf
Code example:
import officetools.OfficeFile; // this is my tools package
FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream(new File("c:/test.html"));
FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream(new File("c:/test.pdf"));
// suppose OpenOffice.org runs on localhost, port 8100
OfficeFile f = new OfficeFile(fis,"localhost","8100", true);
f.convert(fos,"pdf");
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