[Templates] Pretty Printing

[Simon Moore]

We use pdf's created via the latex plugin for printing reports and it 
certainly looks more professional and consistent than printing a web 
page.  See previous thread on Latex for my comments on some of the 
negatives/positives to the Latex approach - suffice to say we use it but 
wish we didn't have to.

You might want to take a look at some other perl modules - there are 
various ones for outputting word documents, excel spreadsheets and PDFs 
(http://search.cpan.org).

You can easily test these perl modules using a PERL block in TT (or 
directly in perl) and see if you like them.  If you do then it is probably 
worth writing a TT plugin to wrap the perl module (far easier than it 
sounds) - I do recommend the book if you haven't already got it on how to 
write your own TT plugin, you should be able to do it in a few lines.

I recently tested PDF::ReportWriter which does do labels, barcodes  and 
invoices so you might want to have a look at that - the xml is easier than 
it looks if you have never done it before, just follow the examples. 
http://entropy.homelinux.org/axis_not_evil/

I can send some test code for PDF::ReportWriter - a template with an XML 
block describing the look, a DBI connection to execute some sql and a PERL 
block to call PDF::ReportWriter (because I was too lazy to write a TT 
plugin for it).  If that is of interest to anyone.  I liked 
PDF::ReportWriter a lot, I created a nice looking report with graphics in 
an hour or so compared with the days it took me to get the Latex equivalent 
looking ok.  But it does not quite go far enough for my needs at the moment.

FOP is the another option for PDFs http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/ and 
it uses JAVA but I believe there is a perl module for it so you could 
theoretically use it from TT.

There are a few others you will no doubt dig up in CPAN that will do the 
kind of things you want.
Regards
Simon




At 15:57 02/06/2006, you wrote:

>A bit off topic, but what methods are people using to get nicely
>printed output?
>
>For example, I currently export to csv which is is used with MS Word
>in a merge to generate things like labels and name tags.  It would be
>nicer to just generate a pdf, for example.
>
>Also have a need to generate good looking invoices.
>
>And big invoices, too, but that's another issue.
>
>
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>Bill Moseley
>moseley@hank.org
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