Converting Documents to PDF in IRIS

Question

Question

#Business Operation #Callout #HealthShare #InterSystems IRIS for Health

What is the recommended library for converting documents to pdf. Any suggestions welcome has anyone out there had a use case where they had to convert documents to pdf .What worked for them .I have asked WRC for the best practice and they have recommended that may be a sale engineer might have an answer to this .

Product version: IRIS 2024.2

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score 0 · Answer 1 · 2025-02-26T00:41:08-05:00

Hi,

Iris comes with a PDF render engine based on Apache FOP. This is though more used to create PDF documents from scratch than convert documents to pdf.

PDF render config documentation

Which is used in the now deprecated ZENReports %ZEN.Report.PrintServer - InterSystems IRIS Data Platform 2024.3 - including private class members

The other option is to make use of InterSystems Reports, but again this is for creating new pdfs from data contained in the database, not converting existing documents to pdf.

score 0 · Answer 2 · 2025-02-26T03:15:29-05:00

Hey Thembelani.

You have a few options you can go for depending on what formats you are attempting to convert from.

You could look at something like using pandoc via the command line (as in, building an operation that does the command line calling, and then creating a set of request/response classes to call from a Process in your IRIS instance), or with with Python becoming more popular in IRIS, you could look what packages are available for doing what you're looking to do.

You could also look at libreoffice from the command line, but I found that headless libreoffice was a fair bit slower when running on Windows vs linux, so you may not get a lot of use with this approach depending on what you're running on.