For a current project we had the requirement to publish a more or less "glossy" PDF document containing all information about a certain object. One of the bits of information was...an image. The first trial we used the APEX_WEB_SERVICE.BLOB2CLOBBASE64 function to convert a Blob to clob with base64 encoding. In the RTF Template (used in Word with the BI Publisher plugin) you can reference it using this code : <fo:instream-foreign-object content-type="image/jpg"> <xsl:value-of select=".//PHOTO"/> </fo:instream-foreign-object> (where PHOTO is the alias of the clob column). This works....until you're using a slightly bigger picture than a tiny thumbnail. In that case you hit the 32K limit per report column. Although Marc Sewtz (from the APEX Development Team) sort of "promised" to lift this limit in his blogpost of Jun 13 2008 (!) ( http://marcsewtz.blogspot.com/2008/06/one-question-about-pdf-printing-feature.h