I’ve recently developed a print classified pagination tool that’ll be going open source shortly. The tool allows any system that maintains a database of classified ads to fairly easily produce print-ready PDFs containing classified ad listings.

It should handle any restricted-tags plain-text ads and image-only ads effortlessly. Rich text ads, such as those using HTML subset markup, can be supported easily so long as the markup translates reasonably well into XSL-FO (which most simple HTML does).

If you’re interested in using such a tool to provide osclass with print output facilities, I’d be happy to throw the code your way for an initial look, while I work on tidying it up for wider release. Email me at the address supplied if this strikes your fancy.

A few technical and feature details:

- Automatically inserts house ads where required to fill white-space holes at the bottom of columns
- Proper heading repeat at the top of classifications broken over columns
- Proper vertical justification in columns – no ugly whitespace holes
- Absolutely no manual intervention required for fiddling with layout like house ad placement
- Produces PDF, PostScript, or any other format supported by Apache FOP as a final target
- Can be used to produce press-ready pages, or sections to import into Quark/InDesign/whatever
- Uses Apache FOP to do the grunt-work of pagination and layout
- Uses the standard XSL-FO format to feed into FOP
- Produces FOP input using XSLT from any reasonable XML structure.
- Easily database driven, as any decent database can produce ready-to-consume XML from whatever structure the ad management app is using to represent ads
- Written in Java (to make use of the Java-based Apache FOP easier), but callable from anything via a simple command line or embedding in another Java app/servlet.

Limitations:

- Single column ads only. No ads may span a column.
- RGB or greyscale only, due to Apache FOP limitations. However, it’ll happily spit out press-ready PDF/X1a with appropriate ICC profile tags, and you can always use PitStop etc to convert that to CMYK if you have a brain-dead printer that doesn’t use embedded profiles properly.
- You’ll need to learn XSL-FO to develop your page templates, there’s no design tool and probably won’t be.
- You’ll need to learn XSLT to develop the conversion between your ad format and the required XSL-FO input, unless you can produce ads in a structure that the existing XSLT understands.

Contact: python -c “print ‘Y3JhaWdAcG9zdG5ld3NwYXBlcnMuY29tLmF1′.decode(‘base-64′)”