Topic of interest: Internationalization issues with new technologies

Designing a single software system to generate documents in diverse locales presents interesting challenges. Legal documents are especially difficult, because they must meet strict requirements of formatting, graphics, and typography.

This paper describes the design and implementation of a system that takes multilingual XML data from a Java program and generates localized printed documents. The document formats are customizable to meet the stringent formatting and typographical requirements of a number of end user sites, each of which has its own language and its own set of legal documents to be generated.

To implement this system, we chose to use the PDF forms feature of Adobe Acrobat. We transform the XML data supplied by the Java program into PDF Forms Data Format using XML Stylesheet Tranformation (XSLT), and send the result to Acrobat. This paper describes the advantages of using this approach, as well as the problems we have encountered along the way, and how we worked around them. In particular, the support in Acrobat for Unicode text and the various fonts that support all the necessary glyphs has changed and improved dramatically over the past several years.

This paper mentions the use of Java, XML, XSLT, and PDF forms, but does not require a thorough understanding of any of them. A basic understanding of Unicode character code points, and the concept that Unicode text can be encoded in various forms, such as UTF-16, is assumed.