PyCON 2024 in Pittsburgh experience
I am a regular visitior of PyCON US conference since 2001 and I visited most
Quick test of a new PDF converter supporting CSS Paged Media.
callas software GmbH released today their pdfChip PDF converter product that follows the same CSS Paged Media approach. We are using CSS Paged Media converters like PrinceXML or PDFreactor for years for generating high-quality PDF documents from XML and HTML content. As an expert in this field I did some quick tests with the new converter based on real-world customer content that are running our Produce & Publish solution in production for years.
The statement "The Paged Media Module is currently not supported by pdfChip" makes it clear that pdfChip does not want to support the defacto standard for HTML/CSS based publishing or only to a certain degree. pdfChip appears half-baked and essential features that exist in other tools for years are missing. Unfortunately this product is also marketed as being superior over all other tools. This is not the case. There are better and cheaper alternatives.
Even half a year after the first evaluation there is no progress visible. The product remains completely overpriced. Interesting enough: half of the documentation covers barcodes...well, this software seems to be a very expensive barcode generator. As written in my original positing: there are better alternatives. We really hope that alternative projects like Vivliostyle catch up fast in order to provide better and cheaper alternatives. Well, PrinceXML and PDFreactor are obviously superior.
Feel free to contact us for CSS Paged Media consulting.