Re: Prettty printed reports in MSWindows

[Georg Bauhaus <bauhaus@futureapps.de>]

Mark <no_no@dontspam.net> wrote:
: I am currently trying to figure out a good way to print some 
: formatted business reports.

We do that every day (though unfortunately only rarely with the help
of Ada programs).
Things to look at should, I think, include employing
XSL style sheets and XSL transformations, together with a formatting
backend.  (Or DSSSL, precursor to XSL(T).)
You produce a marked up data stream using some XML tags as markup,
and employ a style sheet producing high quality portable, printable
material.
(Several transformers and backends are available, some of them Free
Software, some of them proprietory sofware.)

You can do number formatting using Ada's COBOL facilities, or, to
an acceeptable extent, XSLT number formats, or both Editing and XSL.

Setting up a pipe to a DSSSL program might be an option too.
A well known program suite, Jade, can produce various output
formats, including RTF, TeX, HTML, and MIF.

In producing XML streams, AWS's template mechanism can help, but
you could as well extends your types with a suitable To_XML function,
and possibly combine the two.
If your reports will have mainly data set like items, that is, a sequence
of flat containers so to speak, producing XML data from them should be
straightforward. Otherwise, since XML documents are trees, you might
have to build adapters or some such.

If you are familiar with TeX, which according to Knuth (2000) was
conceived as a backend, you can again use AWS's templates to produce TeX
input; however, page breaking and the presence of inserts (footnotes,
running heads) and absolute positioning might cause some headaches. For
two years or so I have received invoices from a provider that were
automatically produced in that fashion. The results are comparatively
impressive (for invoices), due to the excellent paragraph breaking that
TeX does, hard to beat in particular using good fonts.

HTH, Georg

 

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Georg Bauhaus                              bauhaus@futureapps.de
Future Apps GmbH                        http://www.futureapps.de
phone: +49 203 306 1560