Title: RE: Has anybody used the Crystal Reports and how does it compare to t he FOP?
Jeremias,
Thank you very much for the comments about this issue.
One of the major problems related to the XSL-FO is lack of editors. I'm thinking about using RTF2FO to convert the rtf documents into FO, then the users/developers may use MS Word as FO editor. I have tried this method many times and it works very well. The benefit is that most people are fimilar with MS Word and the RTF to FO convertion is very close to WYSIWYG.
Regards,
Dianliang
-Original Message-
From: Jeremias Maerki [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Saturday, 18 January 2003 12:50 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Has anybody used the Crystal Reports and how does it
compare to t he FOP?
I don't want to make Crystal Reports bad, but I haven't heard much good
from it, although that the last time that was 3 years ago. Things change.
At that time I was working for a Delphi-programming company that have
written their own Reporter because Crystal Reports was suboptimal.
At the end you'll have to choose the tool that you're most comfortable
with. Do the people who have to create the reports like the tool their
working with? Does the tool support the things you need to be able to
do?
One thought I'd like to give you on your way is the one about standards
conformance: On one side you need different input and output formats
(such as XML, PDF, PostScript). Both FOP and Crystal Reports support a
variety of standard input and output formats. But what about the layout
style you need to develop for each report, the report itself. Crystal
Reports uses its own proprietary format, while FOP uses XSLT, XSL:FO,
SVG and other standards to accomplish the same. If you use a standard
based tool you have a high probability that you can switch the tool
without having to redo each and every report. You may well be able to
process your report using RenderX's XEP or the upcoming Adobe server or
whatever.
What about the editors? With Crystal Reports you get theirs. With XSL
you can use some editor. On the other side there's the problem that
XSL doesn't have any editors, yet, that get near the functionality of
that one from Crystal Reports. WYSIWYG and all.
Good luck with the decision.
On 16.01.2003 00:43:07 Dianliang Zhu wrote:
I'm currently facing a difficult decision whether to keep developing
reports using FOP or changing over to the Crystal Reports. Having been using
FOP for more than 2 years, I have gained lots of experiences in it. So I
would prefer FOP rather than any other reporting tools. But my work mates
want to use Crystal Reports. They claim that the Crystal Report is better
than FOP in terms of speed, functionality, usability and etc.
I don't know too much about the Crystal Report, so I would really
appreciate if someone can compare different aspects of FOP and Crystal
Report. I need it to justify the development in FOP! Thank you!
Jeremias Maerki
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