R – Creating interactive reports in PDF

airalivepdfapache-flexflashpdf

I want to create reports that can be drilled down by the readers – but the reports have to be PDF. I have two options:

  1. Link from the PDF to an online report tool
  2. Make the reports themselves interactive

I like #2…

I believe I can do this with Adobe AIR (Flex, Flash + Adobe Reader 9 or higher).

There are tools that can create PDF documents programatically (AIR?, AlivePDF)

There are frameworks in Adboe that are ideal for reports and charts (Flex)

And PDF documents can contain flash content (Adobe Reader 9+)

My questions are:

  1. If I have an interactive Flash component in a PDF document and I go to print, what will print? Will the current view of he Flash print?

  2. If I want to drill down, all the data has to be in the PDF document (it has to be stand alone). This is fine… but how to do I put the data in the PDF programatically? Is this done with Flex and AlivePDF?

  3. I saw an online sample of an interactive charting report in a PDF document, but now I can't find it. 🙁 I would love to find something again if you know of one.

I feel that I may have all the pieces, but not understanding correctly how they all go together. Any ideas?

Best Answer

Answer to question 3: Currently AlivePDF does not allow you to embed Flash content into a generated PDF. The generated PDFs can include text, images, simple graphics, and certain non-visual features such as bookmarks.

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