Introduction
The speedata Publisher is software for creating PDF files fully automatically from XML data. The data can be product data, structured texts or other content, for example.
The instructions on how something is to be displayed are available separately from the data. They are formulated in a programming language specially developed for this purpose.
What is it all for?
Many different documents can be created with the speedata Publisher. Classical use cases are
- Product catalogues
- Travel guides
- Price lists
- Data sheets
and many other documents, where it is important to obtain a result that is reproducible, fast and reliable and also “beautiful”.
Beautiful and fully automatic
The speedata Publisher is a non-interactive publishing software. This means there is no graphical user interface (GUI). All instructions must be established before the publishing process and determine how the data is arranged in the PDF. The unique combination of sophisticated algorithms and programmability allows extremely flexible layouts to be created that were previously reserved for interactive desktop publishing (DTP) programs such as Adobe’s InDesign.
Where can I get the software and how is it run?
The software can be downloaded for free (see chapter Installation) and is started via the console or shell. The command to start the Publisher is called sp. Therewith, all functionality can be used. Parameters can be specified via the command line or a configuration file.
$ sp
See the command line section for explanations on how to start the Publisher.
Examples
You can find some examples of real world documents in the showcase. If you need hands-on examples, you can find them in a separate repository on Github (https://github.com/speedata/examples). There you can find complete documents, which you can use to try out different functionality.
Examples from the repository
Remark: most of this manual is automatically translated. If you find any mistakes, please report them.