[pro] Professional Reports

[Vladimir Sedach]

> if i were to start today, i'd either generate libreoffice's xml format
> (you can exec commandline tools to generate pdf);

I tried this two years ago and ran into some problems. As I remember:

OpenOffice (of which Libre Office is a fork) had a weird client-server
model for command-line use. It was a pain to set up initially, and the
version of OpenOffice that came with Debian on our servers didn't work
at all. The best way to check if a document would finish being printed
as a PDF was to poll the filesystem. It took a long time to generate
the PDFs, and what's worse is that this time varied widely with no
apparent causes. The whole process was unreliable.

The templating itself was tricky. As you mentioned the node order
matters, but also there were all sorts of undocumented dependencies
between nodes (I was templating spreadsheets) and how node attributes
were used.

Maybe things have improved by now, but if I had to do the same thing
again I would not rely on Libre Office. There's too much bloat to deal
with on both the development and system administration sides.

The big draw with Libre Office was that you can let business users
easily customize the templates. A friend of mine is doing a SaaS web
app in Common Lisp, generating documents via LaTeX, and is making a
small web app that lets users customize the template layout. IMO this
is simple enough to do that it's the approach I would use today (using
CL-PDF or maybe cl-typesetting directly instead of going through
LaTeX).

Vladimir