Spec me an output format / markup language

[Adam_151]

Just looking for some ideas on this folks,

I am trying to get my head around a project for work to try and improve the way some technical reports are written and produced, I can get my head around how I would do most of it, one thing I am missing is what format to use to present the data from the back end into a report that can be presented to the client.

At the moment we type them in word and have a template set up. Now *.DOC is obviously a no go, because its a closed format. Now I did consider HTML but that is designed to be displayed on a screen rather than printed and I need to control how it falls on the page (i.e. a numbered bullet point and its associated image all one one page not spread across 2) and also page numbering (which needs to be integrated with other pages.... so if I had a 5 page report, it might be added to 10 pages of test data. So the report would theen need numbering 11/15 to 15/15 not 1/5 to 5/5 as it would if you printed a HTML file.

So my question is simply, is there anything out there, such as a page layout 'language' that is designed for print and is easily enough to spit out from a bit of code?

Any ideas welcome

 

[Adam_151]

Thanks for your response, Peter

1) The DOCX format is an open standard, so you can update your word templates to that. If the client doesn't have MS Word, they can use OpenOffice. However, who the hell doesn't have Word in the business world ?

Is DocX pretty easy to write a program to spit out, I remember opening DOC files in a text editor once and it was basically a lot of random characters surrounding bits of the text.... it didn't have any format you could understand... like for example HTML did. I assume DOCX is different?

2) Use a word to pdf converter and present PDF's to the client. Adobe reader is free. Advantage here is they can't be changed after you create them. Useful if someone trys to get "creative".

We do issue as PDF as a final step and the plan is not to change that. The docuement gets printed through a PDF printer driver. Combined with the PDF spat out by the program that processes the test data and issued as one PDF. We don't currently lock the PDF but perhaps we should... though from what I have seen if you want to break it, there are tools to do so

Anything else is likely to be pain. Once you start trying to control the precise print layout its a world of hurt. You might format for A4 and the client suddenly wants US legal, or A5 or A3. They may want uneven gutters for ring / book binding. It is a complete can of worms .... try and use a standard tool like word.

They can have it in A4, or A4 . They get the choice of Printed and bound A4, or a PDF so they can print it themselves A4. Or both if they so desire

You won't need a programmer to make changes to the layout if your import tags for the merged report data are clear enough.

This is new ground for me, are you saying I can get word itself to pull fields in the document from an external source? I don't suppose you could recommend any good tutorials on this?

Final suggestion is Crystal Reports. Never used it myself, but I hear good things and its been around forever, so should be plenty of knowledge you can google.

I have heard of it, but never known any more about it... time to do some research, I think

Thanks again

 

[Adam_151]

Still Open XML.

Thanks. Sorry, missed that when I came to reply yesterday evening

Do you have any links to good tutorials / examples ?