Use Inkscape and XSLT to Create Cross-Platform Reports and Forms, an article by Chad Files on the Linux Journal website that details a workflow to produce dynamic forms and reports for both print and web using Inkscape and Xslt.
Description of the problem and requirements:
Health-care claims are very intricate (Figure 1). Many boxes and boilerplate text have to be drawn. The conventional way to do this with a software application is to draw a series of lines using coordinates and lengths, and then lay the static and dynamic content on top of the newly drawn lines. [...]
Our requirements were as follows:
* We must be able to print high-quality versions of the claims.
* Claims must be accessible from a Web browser.
* The solution has to be programming language-independent. We use Python, PHP, Perl and Java. The images need to be created using any of these languages.
* We must be able to convert the claim data and form into several different file formats, specifically PDF and PNG.
* The entire solution must be platform-independent.
The solution:
Basically, we would take an SVG image of the claim form and make it into an XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformation), because the SVG format is a special XML format. Then, we would pull the claim data from our database and convert it into an XML string. Using any of our languages, we could then take the XSLT and the XML and create an SVG image of the claim. This solution met all of our requirements. It was language- and platform-independent. We could print the SVG images and embed them into Web pages. Furthermore, SVG images can be converted into different file formats easily. Another nice feature of this solution is the small file size of the SVG images. If we wanted to archive the images, they would take a fraction of the space the old solution did. Because SVG images are text, not compressed binary, the files can be compressed and save even more space.
Read the article for the details of the implementation and test the sample code.