Saving the data as PDF

Sybase WorkSpace provides two ways to save a DataWindow object.

Using GNU Ghostscript

By default, when you select File>Save Rows As and select PDF as the file type, the data is printed to a PostScript file and automatically distilled to PDF using GNU Ghostscript. This option provides a robust solution that can save most types of DataWindow objects.

Installing Ghostscript For licensing reasons, Ghostscript is not installed with Sybase WorkSpace. You (and your users) must download and install it before you can use this technique.

Using XSL-FO and Java printing

Building on the ability to save data as XML, Sybase WorkSpace can also save the DataWindow object’s data and presentation to PDF by generating XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO). This option provides a platform-independent solution by rendering the DataWindow using a Java process rather than the Microsoft GDI. It also offers the possibility of customizing the PDF file at the XSL-FO stage.

The XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) W3C Recommendation has two parts, XSLT and XSL-FO. XSLT provides the transformation typically used to present XML documents as HTML in a browser. XSL-FO provides extensive formatting capabilities that are not dependent on the output format.

For more information about XSL, see Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) Version 1.0.

Limitations

The XSL-FO method currently does not support graph, and composite DataWindow objects.