It's not stupid. I just don't think TeX styling is going to be any
higher level than our PDF::Writer wrappers, and it introduces a huge
toolchain. We at one point were doing TeX output for tables but
dropped it.
We're pretty convinced that for now, the solution we have is the most
pragmatic one for simple support. We'll leave it up to our users to
create custom formatters that wrap other solutions.
(I've wrapped htmldoc before)
I should have an example out soon enough that shows how to wrap rfpdf
with Ruport, but I have no idea how well that will go, or if it will
be worth it. The main appeal there is that it has better i18n
support, but I don't see it replacing PDF::Writer in Ruport any time
soon. :-/
···
On 4/27/07, Mariusz Pękala <skoot@ideico.net> wrote:
Maybe generating TeX and then PDF from it may be good solution?
TeX can do 'styling'.
However, I don't know anything about Ruport (yet) so forgive me if what I
said is stupid. 
I had very seriously considered integrating XML/Fo as I figured that'd
let people use heavy weight tools like FOP and possibly other stuff to
do complex rendering.
I scratched it off as 'too much work' to do between now and May 15th,
and the project I was planning on doing that depended on FOP got
pushed backwards. It's possible that you might see this support in
Ruport eventually, or as a gem_plugin, or in ruport-util.
I'd likely accept a well written patch which generates XML/Fo for our
four standard renderers
(Row,Table,Group,Grouping) and put it directly in Ruport. So if
anyone out there is looking for a project, I'd be happy to help you
work on that...
···
On 4/27/07, John Joyce <dangerwillrobinsondanger@gmail.com> wrote:
Naturally, it would be ideal if there were general intermediary data
format or document format.
The best bet is often XML since we're talking about fundamentally
generated styled documents from a structured document, but of course
it all depends where that data is coming from and where it might go
and how much overhead is really practical for functionality needs
today and future functionality needs. Ideally if it is a valid xhtml
document, that should be more translatable to pdf.
These really are quite beautiful. I think I saw tioga before and
thought it was quite nice, but it has platform and tool-chain
dependence. If I ever have a job at work that requires this sort of
thing, I might create some integration for ruport-util, but I can't
bring myself to put anything in ruport itself that makes it even
slightly difficult to use on windows, or any platform for that matter.
(Of course, DBI is the skeleton in our closet there)
···
On 4/27/07, Edwin Van leeuwen <edder@tkwsping.nl> wrote:
Have you ever looked at tioga. It creates figures directly in pdf and
then uses tex for text formatting. It is very flexible and allows you to
create beautiful figures in pdf, so it might be something to look at.