list user wrote:
Hi All;
I'm looking for a way to generate a PDF report based on a set of data in a database and a set of pre-generated graphs via some sort of procedural method based on a template.
We tried to do this via open office & it's templating features but this process requires us to first generate an odt file based on xml and then open the open office odt file and export to a PDF, unfortunately our first stab generated a 150GB odt file. This is of course an unacceptable method. So, I'm looking for a way to generate PDF's straight away as described above. Anyone have any ideas?
It depends on how good you want them to look. Assuming that "readable" is the goal, generate HTML and use html2ps | pstopdf out the output end. The nice thing is the HTML is generally useful for reports by itself, so win-win.
If you want presentation quality, start learning troff. I wrote hundreds of pages in troff, "back when," and it is great at text to beautiful. Not a skill in high demand, and there are other things. Knuth would tell you that TeX is the one to use.