We just completed a multi month effort which is just this project. It generats HTML tables and graphs and Excel spreadsheets ( through COM ). Reportlab and LaTex could have worked technically but didn't quite fit the client's existing culture.
The graphs are done with http://biggles.sourceforge.net which I have found very simple and solid. Html is generated ( as tables or with image files created by biggles ), there is a CSS tag which causes a page break when printed. That is enough to get decent output ( turn off the extra printing junk in IE or Netscape to get less cluttered printouts ). An advantage of HTML is that tables with many rows of data can be put into separate frames from the column headers so the headers can be viewed while the data is scrolled, try that in a PDF. We created a templating scheme ( there are many complex reports ) which is really just Python code and a web ui for editing and composing views of the data. The data is created and calculated in Numeric Python arrays, the web ui runs as PSP pages through WebKit. The reports can also be created and the systemm unit tested from the command line. Creating Excel ( or Word ) documents through COM is *very* slow, but it gives one full control over the results ( rather than importing a html or csv file ). have fun. S -----Original Message----- From: Kįri Haršarson [mailto:kari@;grunnur.is] Sent: Friday, October 18, 2002 3:54 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Formatting reports with Python Hello all, I would like to get some opinionated opinions from you on a design decision I have to make. The system we write and sell is written in Python, and now we need reports on paper. Until now, all reports have been made available from a website, but users complain that they don't look good enough and have unnecessary page feeds. We have been mulling over the methods available from Python: 1) Produce HTML but try to format it for a printer, not screen. Pagination will always be a problem, but this is the quickest way to do it. 2) Use the PDF format and learn how to use ReportLab. I must confess that the online tutorial seems daunting. In any case, the reader will have to install Adobe Acrobat Reader to have a look at the document, and not all employees at our clients have one installed. I do like this method the best right now. 3) Learn how to use the RTF format. At least every user can open and print such a document from Wordpad if nothing else. Downside is, noone has an RTF based report generator for Python unless I'm mistaken ? Writing in raw RTF doesn't sound fun. 4) Generate a Word Document by running Word via COM on the webserver where our system is running. This might crash the webserver and is probably slow ? If someone has experience with one of the above methods or knows about yet another way to do this, I'd love to hear about it ! Best regards, Kari Hardarson, Iceland _______________________________________________ ActivePython mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe: http://listserv.ActiveState.com/mailman/mysubs Other options: http://listserv.ActiveState.com/mailman/listinfo/ActivePython _______________________________________________ ActivePython mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe: http://listserv.ActiveState.com/mailman/mysubs Other options: http://listserv.ActiveState.com/mailman/listinfo/ActivePython
