so I found this application from an article in A List Apart. I think I have a website / client that will benefit from using this software. But I do not know where to begin, I know almost nothing about command-line-interface. I do know some php, javascript and other web formats (however I am unable to use php or anything other than javascript for this particular website). My biggest question is where do I start? I have downloaded prince, and run Prince on magic.xml and viewed the output. Now I have excel spreadsheets and html pages with information from medical forms that I need to output into PDFs. Do I need a straight XML file (without html-style head, body, etc formatting) or do I need XHTML saved in an xml file? Thanks in advance for any help.

You can run Prince directly on HTML or XHTML files, or XML files styled with CSS, from the Windows GUI or from the terminal in MacOS X or Linux. Which operating system are you using? It is probably best to start with some simple examples to get familiar with the program first.

ok, thanks for noting that xml should have css within it (i did see that in the file, but it simply looked like an html document saved as xml). also, i did try running prince on a sample html file i may be working with, and it worked fine. but after the 3rd or 4th time of trying to run prince on it, i get the error messages:

prince: error: could not load input file
prince: error: no input documents to process

and i'm using the exact same path i used when prince correctly output a pdf. i was getting this error when i first began trying to use prince (after successfully outputting the magic.pdf). do i need to quit terminal and restart? i wasn't finding any support information that explained to me what was going on. thanks again for the help

oh, and i'm on a mac


***Update***

It seems that i may be receiving the error when i add css to the document. i believe that the below lines have worked 100% in the past

<style type="text/css">
div#container-header, div#container-nav, div#helpbox, div#my-glider, div.extenddb, div.footerbuttons, div#actionbox, input, span + table, select, textarea, div#footer { display:none; }
</style>

but once i added

img[alt='Select Date'], 

to the list of items set to display:none, i got the error:

error: could not load input file
prince: error: no input documents to process

i checked the documentation for unsupported css, and this isn't listed. can anyone explain the problem i'm having?

also, upon removing the supposedly offending line of css, i still get the same error. do i need to restart terminal / prince?

Hmm, the CSS looks fine, and the Terminal should not require a restart. It looks like Prince can't find the specified file; can you verify that you are passing in the correct filename? Perhaps you are in a different folder or something like that?

it should be that, but no its not the problem. i copy the command line from previous working commands (to files within the same folder), and i highly doubt that's my problem (although its not an impossibility), i am usually pretty good at spotting differences in code. if you are sure that something else isn't triggering this, i will go back and look through my commands.

Perhaps cut and paste the sequence of commands and responses and email them to me (mikeday@yeslogic.com), then perhaps I can spot something.