Re: Creating printable reports

[Russell Shaw <rjshaw netspace net au>]

Daniel Kasak wrote:
> Hi all.
>
> I'm a newbie Perl developer, and I'm part-way through porting our 
> database front-ends from Access to Perl / Gtk2 ( running on Linux ).
> We need a few printable reports that I have to rebuild. I've started out 
> doing them in a Perl CGI script, exporting an HTML 'report' and firing 
> up Mozilla to view / print them. This is less than perfect. Mozilla 
> doesn't support the @page directive, so controlling pagination and 
> headers / footers is a nightmare.
>
> What options do I have with GTK / Gnome?
> Requirements are basically headers & footers and pagination, and of 
> course Perl bindings, but I'll check this out.
> Any takers?

Haven't dealt with text processing for a while but there's a few ways:

- generate the reports directly as TEX or postscript (TEX is hard to learn),
- generate the reports in a word-processor and embed keywords
  in it, and save in TEX or postscript format as a canned file, then
  run sed or C regex lib commands to replace the keywords with your
  own end-user text.