[pro] Professional Reports

[Daniel Pezely]

On May 18, 2011, at 11:11 PM, Nico de Jager wrote:

> I am looking for tips to create professional multi-page reports,
> invoices, etc, preferably producing standalone files like PDFs that can
> be emailed. Automatic page calculation would be great, and I'd like to
> include generated and static images (e.g. graphs and logos).


The answer depends upon how fancy and whether or not criteria may shift radically over time.

Not for everyone and may be overkill for your particular needs:

For the extreme case, I generated LaTeX and TeX much like one /might/ produce HTML: concatenating static portions and generated portions.  This gave the most flexibility of known options in 2005, when I was getting back into CL and didn't know of all the places to look for libraries.  (Thanks Xach for Quicklisp and liberating us from those dark ages!)

While this resembles "not invented here" syndrome, we knew that our tables required very specialized styling unsupported by libraries found at that time: e.g., some column groups having two extra risers/labels, minimal use of grid lines, etc.

Some criticized this approach and suggested DocBook, but I perceived that to be bloated beyond my baseline loathing of xml.  

I found the TeX/LaTeX approach more familiar based upon strict HTML and CSS (you can see TeX's influence on HTML and CSS), and people we hired appreciated the decision as well.

Start here: www.tug.org and www.latex-project.org

-Daniel

PS - for completeness, the project started in Python, and Lisp came later.  I'd take the same approach now that I've been almost exclusively in CL since then, assuming the same criteria.

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