Generating gorgeous Word documents, PDFs, and Excel spreadsheets is something that Microsoft developers can take for granted. However it's considerably trickier for open source developers. Several different options were evaluated including deploying on Windows, writing some C# or VB code, and outsourcing the entire function to another party.

Michael Koziarski will take you through the pros and cons of the various options available to you, and then provide more detail on the current solution used at Plan HQ. By using Open Document and Open Office you can get robust and reliable export of Word documents and PDFs from one codebase, without the need to compromise the preferred deployment platform.