Generate documents and render them into PDF

Got an interesting problem to solve today.

An acquaintance of mine wants a solution in which we generate question papers for any test dynamically from a given set of questions (which might be stored in a database or something). They also want an answer-key generated out of the same, and the output format everywhere should be PDF.

Shailesh agreed to work with me on this. And when asked for a timeline for the solution, we went searching for a tool to generate PDF programmatically, and also it had to be free. Well, no one is paying us for this project, and we can’t pay someone else either! We came across a very helpful page, which contains a lot of links for PDF generation libraries http://www.geocities.com/marcoschmidt.geo/java-libraries-pdf.html.

One in the list caught my attention, FOP from the Apache Project (Me being an Apache fan always!). We are exploring the solution now, hopefully we will crack out something good out of it.