Re: Generating PDFs with Ada

[Maciej Sobczak <see.my.homepage@gmail.com>]

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.

Some years ago I have been working on the application that was
supposed to produce Excel documents. I have done it via COM interfaces
and consider it to be the only reasonable solution for this kind of
tasks.
The file format might be non-standard, intentionally obfuscated, evil
and whatever you call it, but the API is documented and works very
well. Reimplementing the internal file format engine is pointless if
the document can be already produced at the level of its logical
content.

Now, the question is how to access COM interfaces from Ada, but I
believe this problem is already solved, as it is much more generic
than producing Word files.

The article describes alternative solutions as well, but none of them
is even close to writing Word files directly.

--
Maciej Sobczak * www.msobczak.com * www.inspirel.com