[Gllug] SCSI and /dev

[Richard Jones]

On Thu, Mar 04, 2004 at 11:59:10AM +0000, Richard Huxton wrote:
> On Thursday 04 March 2004 11:09, Tom Schutzer-Weissmann wrote:
> > >>> mike at coruscant.demon.co.uk 03/03/04 07:53pm >>>
> > >
> > > Are there any good alternatives to Crystal Reports? I'd kill for an open
> > > source cross platform reporting tool that integrates well with Windows
> > > and non-Windows platforms, provides an interface that non-techies can
> > > design reports in, and replicates the functionality of Crystal. I've yet
> > > to see a credible free software alternative...
> >
> > Nope. I'm tempted to use xml-fo, but there are no good non-techie tools for
> > it, as far as I know. Out main problem with CR is that you can't automate
> > printing to file. You can export to PDF, but we need to combine lots of
> > reports into one document, and that's much easier with postscript than with
> > pdf. So we use an ugly hack.
> 
> I did notice some PDF tools posted on Freshmeat the other day (this week, 
> definitely) - commandline tools to merge/split/extract pages from/to PDFs.
> 
> I've been experimenting with producing OpenOffice files and using that to 
> print to PS/PDF (using vnc rather than a standard X server). Actually, I put 
> the sample report together in OOo word and convert that.

I've had good results producing groff files and piping them through
'groff -ms | ps2pdf14'

Of course not very end-user friendly, but easy to generate from a
simple script and Makefile, and the results look much better than
anything you can achieve in OpenOffice/Office.

Rich.

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