Specifying output properties

IBM® Rational® Publishing Engine can produce Microsoft Word, HTML, PDF, and XSL-FO documents. No additional software is required to generate the documents, though you might require additional software to view the generated results or to perform postprocessing operations.

Output types

  • Microsoft Word: Creates Microsoft Word 1997-2003 (.doc) or Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, or 2013 (.docx) output.
  • HTML: Creates HTML (.html) or HTM (.htm) output.
  • PDF: Creates PDF (.pdf) output.
  • XSL-FO: Creates XSL-FO (.fo) or XML (.xml) output, both of which can be used in XML editors.
Note:
  • IBM Rational Publishing Engine supports Unicode data only. If the data source includes Non-Unicode data the document generation might fail or produce incorrect results.
  • For PDF and Legacy PDF, the output extension is the same, however, the drivers used to generate the documents is different. The PDF output is structured differently depending on which driver you select. For a list of fields supported by the PDF driver, see Supported fields in PDF documents.

Selecting an output type

Table 1. Selecting an output type based on the template contents.

If your template includes these elements or items, consider using these selected output types.

Template element/consideration Microsoft Word HTML PDF XSL-FO
Master pages Yes No Yes No
Style sheets Yes Yes No No
Footnotes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Comments Yes Yes No Yes
Paragraph borders Yes Yes Yes* Yes
Table with unrestricted width No Yes No Yes
Table cells combined by span element Yes Yes Yes Yes
Table cells containing bookmarks Yes Yes Yes Yes
Table borders Yes Yes Yes* Yes
Cell spacing in tables Yes Yes No Yes
Ordered lists with character spacing Yes Yes No Yes
Ordered lists with lowercase letters or Roman numerals Yes Yes Yes Yes
Ordered lists with capitalized letters Yes Yes No Yes
Table of Contents/Table of Tables/Table of Figures Yes Yes Yes Yes
Large images Yes Yes Yes* Yes
Generates a document with more than 4000 pages Yes Yes No Yes
Note: *For these output types, you must specify values for the output to render correctly.

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