Glom Precise Printouts

[Greg Breland <gbreland weldae org>]

I would stick to HTML as it can meet all of your requirements except the
last one were I think you want to have a GTK front end to build the
reports.  Using absolute positioning of DIVs and the CSS media
properties, almost all reports can be done in HTML.  

The only advantage a fixed positioned reporting system like Crystal
Reports or PDF has over HTML is better header/footer control and from
printer to printer the layout is a little more stable.  However, it
isn't that much better.   I have a customer that prints a lot of medical
forms.  The reports were done with Crystal Reports and to come even
close to hitting the blanks, they can only use an HP printer with an HP4
or HP5 driver.

Anyone wanting to fill in pre-existing forms is going to have to take
the time to manually tweak the report to match a given printer/driver
combo.  This holds true for HTML reports too, with a little more
tweaking between different printers than something like Crystal Reports
would have.

My wife just finished a project where she had to print Avery labels from
a web application.  She had access to FOP, the Java PDF layout engine
and she still ended up going with HTML output because it was more
accurate range of printer models she had to work with.

Having said all that; Since the last time we discussed this, FireFox 1.5
has been released with native SVG support.  Now that almost every
desktop has an SVG client, maybe SVG is worth looking at.  Again,
wouldn't satisfy your last requirement of a GTK front end, but it would
give you 100% control over the output.