Hey all, I was recommended to come here by a CS buddy of mine. I want to develop an application that takes simple text inputs and produces a formatted output file, i.e. I already know what the format the output should take, and I want the user to only have to type in the content and not have to worry about the formatting. Ideally this output would be a document (PDF,
RTF).
I've seen something like this deployed with Ruby on Rails on a website that works pretty well and produces an HTML page with the formatting applied, so I know it can be done. I'm just not sure what the easiest way is to develop this. My programming experience is relatively novice-to-intermediate with
Java, but I do have fairly extensive web development experience in HTML, PHP, CSS (standard stuff), and I'm good at programming overall.
At the moment I bounced around the idea of making an application in Java to do this, but I'm not sure that's the best approach - to my knowledge, it wouldn't be terribly difficult making the UI for taking inputs, but going from those inputs to a formatted document could be nightmarish? I'm not really sure how good Java is at handling that :\
Anyway, any thoughts on this would be appreciated! Thank you!