We use pdf's created via the latex plugin for printing reports and it
certainly looks more professional and consistent than printing a web
page. See previous thread on Latex for my comments on some of the
negatives/positives to the Latex approach - suffice to say we use it but
wish we didn't have to.
You might want to take a look at some other perl modules - there are
various ones for outputting word documents, excel spreadsheets and PDFs
(http://search.cpan.org).
You can easily test these perl modules using a PERL block in TT (or
directly in perl) and see if you like them. If you do then it is probably
worth writing a TT plugin to wrap the perl module (far easier than it
sounds) - I do recommend the book if you haven't already got it on how to
write your own TT plugin, you should be able to do it in a few lines.
I recently tested PDF::ReportWriter which does do labels, barcodes and
invoices so you might want to have a look at that - the xml is easier than
it looks if you have never done it before, just follow the examples.
http://entropy.homelinux.org/axis_not_evil/
I can send some test code for PDF::ReportWriter - a template with an XML
block describing the look, a DBI connection to execute some sql and a PERL
block to call PDF::ReportWriter (because I was too lazy to write a TT
plugin for it). If that is of interest to anyone. I liked
PDF::ReportWriter a lot, I created a nice looking report with graphics in
an hour or so compared with the days it took me to get the Latex equivalent
looking ok. But it does not quite go far enough for my needs at the moment.
FOP is the another option for PDFs http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/ and
it uses JAVA but I believe there is a perl module for it so you could
theoretically use it from TT.
There are a few others you will no doubt dig up in CPAN that will do the
kind of things you want.
Regards
Simon
At 15:57 02/06/2006, you wrote:
A bit off topic, but what methods are people using to get nicely
printed output?
For example, I currently export to csv which is is used with MS Word
in a merge to generate things like labels and name tags. It would be
nicer to just generate a pdf, for example.
Also have a need to generate good looking invoices.
And big invoices, too, but that's another issue.
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Bill Moseley
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