Rendering HTML content in print- and PDF-output

Excuse my bad english...

We are using JasperReports for the creation of our print- and pdf-output for offers, order confirmations, invoices etc.

Especially our offers are quite complex and our user demands more and more sophisticated output like list, tables, images etc. that are freely editable like MS Word or other text processing applications.

All this can we do with html. There are Java editors and viewing components avaiable for editing html to generate this output. But when it comes to printing and PDF-generation, we have not found a way to render this content in JasperReports.

JasperReports has an old experimental html component but this is not really usable.

What we need is a html component that act more like a subreport. A defined width on a band that is rendererd with the html content from top to bottom with some clever logic to potentially split across multiply pages. That would be a great and big help!

In its 7.0 version, itext has a add-on that fills this gap: pdfHTMl. Maybe this is useful in some way to bring HTML Rendering to JasperReports, even if we had to license itext.

Many thanks!

Martin