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Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) has become the de facto standard for sharing documents across operating systems and as such is encountered extensively  on the web when documents are required to be downloaded for off line usage or alternatively to present web based content in a more traditional and professional format, providing better print quality over printing web pages directly.

I’ve been looking into using the PDF format to create my resume on demand and also to generate documents dynamically on an application I’ve been working on on Google App Engine. I had previously used Apache FOP for PDF generation but wanted to do a little more research to see what other options were available and came up with the following shortlist:

1. Apache FOP (Formatting Object Processor)
2. iText PDF Library
3. PDF my URL
4. PDF Jet

The following briefly describes my experiences with each and what I finally settled on … (more…)