On Mon, 1 Apr 2002 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> We are choosing some tools for building applications. Php is a very good
> tools to build web applications, but we don't know if it can generate
> printable reports. "Printable reports" mean the report you can print
> what you see on screen (like winword).
>
> We are asking if at here, there are good solutions to generate reports.
> Simply generate html files and print them are not good solutions to us,
> becuase you have to remove header / footer of html files, and html files
> seems not to be used for printing.
>
> We know we can use pdflib to generate pdf files, but it is very
> expensive.... (at least US $1,000) .
In the past I've used RTF for this. Call header('Content-Type:
application/rtf') and then just spit out RTF text.
The format is pretty simple; set up a sample file in your word processor
(the older the word processor you use, the better, since they're less
likely to clutter the file with the reams of clutter than new MS apps dump
into everything they write out; I used MS Word 4.0 as my guide) using the
various features you need, save it as RTF, look at it in a text editor,
repeat a few times, and you should have it mastered within an afternoon.
Many word processors can read it, it's much less work than a PDF, and it's
particularly well-suited for tabular data like reports. You can't get the
same level of graphical prettiness than you can with a PDF, but if you
just need something flexible and easy to work with that almost everyone
can open/read, it's a good way to go.
miguel
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