Through its many Serializers, Cocoon can transform XML data into many output formats, including, but not limited to:

- XML (obviously)
- HTML
- PDF
- RTF
- HSSF (Excel's Horrible SpreadSheet Format)
- WAP/WML
- SVG
- PNG, JPEG
- OpenOffice Write, Draw and Calc formats
- ZIP archives
- MIDI files
- Flash animations
- Plain text
- VRML

We say not limited to, because we might have forgotten to list some, but also because it is fairly easy for a Java programmer to implement any output format by writing a new Serializer or extending an existing one.

The Hello world samples of Cocoon give simple examples of how these formats are generated.

Our simple example will let you input some text and create a PDF document out of it, using the PDFSerializer based on the Apache FOP project.