How does google make make those awesome PDF reports in Analytics and when you print a Google Doc etc? [closed]

Question

When you print from Google Docs (using the "print" link, not File/Print) you end up printing a nicely formated PDF file instead of relying on the print engine of the browser. Same is true for some of the reports in Google Analytics . . . the printed reports as PDF's are beautiful. How do they do that? I can't imagine they use something like Adobe Acrobat to facilitate it but maybe they do. I've seen some expensive HTML to PDF converters online from time to time but have never tired it. Any thoughts?

Answer 1

If you are specifically looking at how Google does it. If you look at the PDF Properties page, they use Prince 6.0 (see princexml.com)

There are lots of other PDF generators out there. I've had great success with PDFlib for tricky jobs.

Answer 2

iTextSharp and iText are opensource and free PDF generation libraries for .NET and Java respectively.

I've used them to generate report PDF's before and was quite happy with the results.

http://itextsharp.sourceforge.net/

http://www.lowagie.com/iText/