Re: Generating PDFs with Ada

[Manuel Collado <m.collado@domain.invalid>]

El 12/01/2011 10:44, sjw escribi�:
> 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."

Another possibility is to use the "Microsoft Office XML formats":

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_XML_formats

Any general-purpose XML tool or library can handle them.

-- 
Manuel Collado - http://lml.ls.fi.upm.es/~mcollado