RealObjects PDFreactor is a powerful formatting processor that enables server-side PDF creation from XML and XHTML/HTML documents using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to define page layout and styles. You can dynamically generate PDF documents such as reports, invoices, statements and others on-the-fly. Since PDFreactor runs on your server, the end-user does not need any software other than a Web browser with a free PDF viewer.

By implementing the W3C specification for Paged Media and print, PDFreactor provides great control over the paged output via CSS. It is very easy to set page sizes, margins and pagination for specific elements, page headers andf footers. Using proprietary configuration and CSS properties, it is possible to set PDF specific information, to generate outlines and links for your documents and even to add meta information about the author or keywords.

PDFreactor is provided as a Java library. The PDFreactor Java API is perfectly complemented by a .NET and a PHP API which enable a smooth cooperation of PDFreactor and your web applications. Being an integrator or developer with focus on Java, Servlet, EJB, CGI, PHP or .NET programming, you can easily integrate PDFreactor into your servlet, EJB or Web Service by using the comprehensive APIs at your disposal.

In the simplest case you only have to specify an input and output file to generate a PDF document. It is also possible to use the operating system's standard input (stdin) and output (stdout) streams to read and write content. This is especially useful when using PDFreactor with server side scripting languages such as PHP, ASP.NET, Perl, etc.

The typical integration scenario for PDFreactor is Server-side PDF creation as part of large host applications (e.g. ERP, database, e-commerce) on a web application server in order to print or stream PDF documents - generated from XML or XHTML/HTML sources - over the Web.