Re: Generating PDFs with Ada

[sjw <simon.j.wright@mac.com>]

On Jan 12, 9:00 am, Maciej Sobczak <see.my.homep...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jan 11, 9:51 am, Stephen Leake <stephen_le...@stephe-leake.org>
> wrote:
>
> > > As long as we're on sort of a similar subject, I've wondered several
> > > times if there are Ada libraries for creating Microsoft Word
> > > documents.
>
> > I hope not :)
>
> Without getting involved into the discussion that follows, I would
> propose everybody to read this:
>
> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html
>
> The most important part starts with "Let Office do the heavy work for
> you", but the whole article is worth reading.

I especially liked this bit:

"If you really want to generate fancy formatted Word documents, your
best bet is to create an RTF document. Everything that Word can do
can
be expressed in RTF, but it’s a text format, not binary, so you can
change things in the RTF document and it’ll still work. You can
create
a nicely formatted document with placeholders in Word, save as RTF,
and then using simple text substitution, replace the placeholders on
the fly. Now you have an RTF document that every version of Word will
open happily."