Re: Laser printing from ADA (Windows)

[Al Christians <achrist@easystreet.com>]

Ehud Lamm wrote:
> 
> Is there a package/binding that gives you easy printing functionallity
> from Windows. I basically want to be able to draw rectangels, print text
> etc. I do not want to deal with low level details.
> 

I would also be interested in whatever solutions might be available or
easily devised for preparing good-looking documents programmatically 
from Ada code under MS Win32.  

The basic idea of Windows is that you're not supposed to have to worry 
too much about it.  If you can put it onto the screen, Windows and the
(printer, etc) drivers are supposed to be able to print it, fax it, 
or whatever.  There are standard editor and viewer routines and programs 
(not in Ada) that should be easy to call from Ada that can handle the 
display and printing of the data. The problem is preparing the document 
in the right format.  Here are some things that might work under 
Windows: 

1. Ascii text -- This is very limited, but the easiest to create.
  
2. HTML --  Any good general purpose Ada HTML generator packages?	
Unfortunately, HTML is not particularly strong at specifying the
appearance of a printed page. Will XML be any improvement for that
purpose?
	
3. RTF  --  Maybe only a little more complicated to generate than 
HTML.  It has facilities for mail-merge type document creation, 
embedded graphics, etc.  This was my best choice for rapid mass-
customization of documents.  Unfortunately, I have not found that
there is much code available for generating RTF programmatically.        
Would this be a good use for Ada?  

4.  PS and PDF -- These are more complicated.  There is a 
C program called Lout that can generate these from specially marked-up
Ascii text.  You could generate the Lout input in Ada. 

5. Crystal Reports --  Set up your document as a report. Put the custom
data in a text database written from your (Ada) program. Call Crystal as 
a DLL (from Ada or otherwise). 

The conventional (non-Ada, off-the-shelf) solutions are fairly
competitive if you have adequate money, adequate bandwidth to the user's
desktop, and performance is not a problem.  I had an application 
recently where all that was not quite true.  We were supposed to come
up with a program that could be distributed on diskettes and would 
put a good-looking report of about 10 pages with about 1000 customized 
fields on the screen in about 10 seconds with wysiwyg printing. TIA
for any suggestions about how to meet such requirements.

Al