You may want to look at BIRT (http://www.eclipse.org/birt/phoenix/). It's a
Java-based reporting engine built on Eclipse, and intended to take data from
databases and produce reports. "BIRT is an Eclipse-based open source reporting
system for web applications, especially those based on Java and Java EE. BIRT
has two main components: a report designer based on Eclipse, and a runtime
component that you can add to your app server. BIRT also offers a charting
engine that lets you add charts to your own application."
Technically, it can probably do what you're looking for -- pull together data,
text and images from a DB -- and produce a PDF report on a server. However,
it's in Java, which may not bring you joy, and there will likely be a good bit
of a learning curve and significant effort to get the reports set up the way
you want.
I haven't used it yet, but I make sure to install the components every time I
update Eclipse, just in case I get inspired to do some Java-based DB
reporting...
Brent
________________________________
From: Saul Caganoff <scagan...@gmail.com>
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com>
Sent: Sunday, May 12, 2013 7:30 PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Web meets Print
I've run into this problem twice in the last 12 months in ruby projects. I've
dealt with it in two different ways:
1. Use the 'win32' library in ruby to write out to an MS Word document. In this
case I did report generation followed by ad hoc (manual) edits and styling. I
wouldn't recommend it but can provide code if you want to go this way.
2. In another project where I had to produce PDF invoices I used the Prawn
library which is essentially a ruby DSL for generating PDF:
http://prawn.majesticseacreature.com/
Regards,
Saul
On 12 May 2013 23:46, Robert J. Cordingley <rob...@cirrillian.com> wrote:
Hey Marcus
>Thanks for the pointers which I will look at closely. So far, they indicate
>to me that this is not a trivial task!
>Robert C
>
>
>On 5/11/13 9:30 PM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote:
>
>On 5/11/13 9:22 AM, Robert J. Cordingley wrote:
>>
>>I want to server-side generate a report from a database, automatically
>>paginate it and prepare a table of contents ready for printing. I'm
>>scripting in PHP against a MySQL database. I already generate the report in
>>HTML/CSS for presentation on a web page where browser printing leaves much to
>>be desired anyway. Content includes styled text and images. I don't know
>>ahead of time how much text will be provided by the database or the sizes of
>>any images which are served by URLs. The final document can be of the order
>>of 100-200 pages.
>>>
>>>
If LaTeX is too unstructured, DocBook might work for you.
>>
>>http://www.docbook.org/tdg5/en/html/docbook.html
>>
>>Pandoc is a powerful converter from there..
>>
>>http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
>>
>>It might be too optimistic to convert your existing HTML to LaTeX, but it
>>might be worth a try.
>>
>>Marcus
>>
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>>
>
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--
Saul Caganoff
Enterprise IT Architect
Mobile: +61 410 430 809
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/scaganoff
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