speedata Publisher by speedata

The speedata Publisher is a full featured professional database publishing software. It has a built-in layout description language which allows you to create arbitrary complex layouts. It reads data in XML format and outputs PDF. Other data formats need to be converted to XML before hand.

Features of the layout description language

• 100% automatic generation of high quality PDF files
• Fully fledged programming language
• Based on standards like XPath and HTML where possible
• Place elements (texts, images, tables, rules, ...) on a grid or with absolute dimensions
• Virtual typesetting. You can typeset anything on a virtual page and measure the dimensions of the result.
• Output of print-ready or “online” PDF
• Support for most languages built in
• High quality typesetting due to a TeX-based line breaking algorithm including margin kerning and font expansion
• Native support for OpenType fonts, XML, Unicode and other up to date technologies
• Built-in multi-pass solution for automatic table of contents, index pages etc.
• Typesetting of complex tables
• Strict XML Schema file (RelaxNG) to prevent syntax errors in the input
• High performance. Many documents take less then a second to generate

Requirements

The speedata Publisher comes in two flavors: as a pre-built package and as a D.I.Y. source code. If you check out the source code, you need a LuaTeX binary with the Lua libxml2 bindings from asbradbury.org. You can at your choice create a single binary or load the Lua bindings at runtime. There is a github repository with a patched version of LuaTeX. That is what we use. You can compile it if you have the libxml2 headers installed.

Install

The contents of this repository is mostly ready to run. Put the sdluatex binary (see section requirements) in the bin/ directory and run "sprun" in your terminal window.

License

AGPL version 3

Author / Contact

The software is written by Patrick Gundlach, speedata. Contact us at info@speedata.de. We also offer commercial support. Follow us on twitter (English and German).

Download

You can download the development code of this project in either zip or tar format.

You can also clone the project with Git by running:

$ git clone git://github.com/speedata/publisher

to get the source code on GitHub: speedata/publisher

Help needed

We need your help. There are lots of things to do, you can participate even just by spreading the word. We are using Trello to organize the development. Join us!