JasperReports and iText Xml Worker

[hnuttin]

Hi all,

In our current project we're already extensively using JasperReports for generating PDF reports. But now we have a new requirement to include rich text (formatted as html) in our reports. So far I've been unable to make this work. According to the documentation; bold, italic and underline should be possible but other tags like <br /> and <ul>, <li> are not rendered at all.

As a result I've been looking for alternatives like iText. iText is perfectly able to do this but (as far as I know) it's not really a reporting tool, just a way to generate PDF documents using a java API. But I wonder why iText is able to make this work (using it's XML Working library) and JasperReports is not while under the hood it's just using iText as it's PDF renderer.

Is there anybody who can explain how it IS possible with JasperReports, or why it is NOT. Alternative solutions are welcome!

thanks in advance

gtz Hans