[pro] Professional Reports

[Attila Lendvai]

> be emailed. Automatic page calculation would be great, and I'd like to
> include generated and static images (e.g. graphs and logos).


we use cl-typesetting and cl-pdf.

page numbers are *kludged* by generating the entire document twice...

unicode characters were a headache, but this might be fixed since then.

we had some major headaches with this framework, because these
libraries have a tendency to fail quietly (e.g. numbers are quietly
not rendered into table cells when they don't fit).


if i were to start today, i'd either generate libreoffice's xml format
(you can exec commandline tools to generate pdf); or look into using
latex, although i have zero first-hand experience with it.

the former, if libreoffice was just a little bit smarter, could yield
a brilliant templating engine:

 - you edit the initial template with libreoffice

 - save it in xml

 - using xml namespaces, you introduce your "unquote"'s that generate
the dynamic part. these chunks may contain libreoffice xml nodes down
deep somewhere, which LO should be smart enough to display (e.g. when
generating a table, then the xml node describing a literal table cell
would be lying somewhere under the unquote xml nodes. LO could provide
a list of nodes it understands for editing, and leave xml nodes it
doesn't understand untouched.)

 - hand out the template for the users for editing with LO


we have something less sophisticated (no WYSIWYG editing under the
first unquote). unfortunately LO is not too friendly for such
use-cases (e.g. no unnamed inline styles; xml node order matters and
styles must be emitted first. argh...)

-- 
 attila

Notice your eroding (digital) freedom, and do something about it!

PGP: 2FA1 A9DC 9C1E BA25 A59C  963F 5D5F 45C7 DFCD 0A39
OTR XMPP: 8647EEAC EA30FEEF E1B55146 573E52EE 21B1FF06
BitCoin: 154uf86Vd9rpjMULd9CXa7nVwikknYZJiB