On Mon, 31 Jan 2005 18:37:44 -0500, Mike Lesser
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi all. Okay, where's that FAQ?
>
> I just started Perl this week. Yikes, gotta get it together.
>
> Anyway, I've been looking at generating PDF files from a script, and
> although I've found (what seem to be) a couple of solutions, I can't
> tell if any of them are: (1)viable, (2) being used by anybody else, (3)
> currently working, and so on. Googling hasn't turned up much in the way
> of perl+pdf+mac, if you know what I mean. I looked at PDFLib Lite and
> some CPAN modules like PDF Template. I've also seen some stuff to
> convert PS to PDF. Any opinions?
>
> I want to crunch up some data from either text files or a MySQL
> database, and make attractive output. It's mostly boxes and plain text,
> like a chart. But what's the easiest/simplest way to go? This is for
> single-user, Panther, non-critical.
>
> Thanks!
>
>
All of the perl PDF options are pretty thin interfaces: they require a
good working knowledge of not only perl, but XML, the pdf layout, and
postscript, at least if you want your data to come out in some sort of
organized table. They're workhorses, but they're not for casual use.
What I do, that works very well, is to use perl to format data as
LaTeX documents and then use pdflatex or TeXshop's visual editor to
render the pdfs. You can even just drop a "system('pfdlatex')" at the
end of the perl script. If you don't already know LaTeX, you can
learn enough for this project in the time it takes to download
TeXshop, or the LaTeX binaries from fink or ports.
HTH,
--jay
