On 31 Jan 2005, at 23:37, Mike Lesser 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.
If you really mean charts, it may be that Graphviz will do what you want. It's not trivial to learn, but it's certainly easier than generating pdfs from raw data. It can output postcript files as well as images. see:
http://search.cpan.org/~lbrocard/GraphViz/ http://www.graphviz.org/
otherwise, if it's only for local use, I don't think perl is the answer unless one of your goals is to learn perl. You're probably better off with a combination of applescript and omnigraffle, using OSX's built-in pdf-printing (which is also applescriptable) to create the final document. If your data is in a perl-friendly form, perhaps also Mac::Glue to hold everything together.
will
