Re: [Gnue-dev] GNUe Reports Output Markup

[Jason Cater]

I think you are addressing pre-printed stock reports.  As stated in the
original email, this solicitation is *NOT* for preprinted reports as
those will undoubtedly require absolute positioning.  I still use a lot
of preprinted forms as well.  They are a completely different breed of
animal. :)  I will address those types of reports in a future email. For
the time being, I want to focus on generic, created-on-the-fly reports. 

-- Jason

On Tue, 26 Mar 2002 20:23:53 -0300
"John Lenton" <address@hidden> wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 26, 2002 at 04:36:22PM -0600, Jason Cater wrote:
> > 1. The report definition shouldn't contain references to page sizes,
> >    etc, for a few reasons:
> >       a) Paper sizes vary by locale (e.g., US Letter vs A4)
> >       b) For outputs such as html, csv, et al, papersize is
> >          irrelevant.
> > 
> >    We might, however, provide *hints* (e.g., this report looks
> >    best in a landscape format, etc)
> 
> this is implied by 2; I'd say yes to 1, no to 2.
> 
> > 2. I'm thinking in terms of a "logical" formatting markup, similar
> >    to HTML, DocBook, or TeX, as opposed to an "absolute" formatting
> >    markup (Postscript). I say this as doing such a format will make
> >    the various final outputs (html, csv, pdf, etc) easier to create
> >    from the same source stream.
> > 
> >    In other words, I don't think the report should denote <draw
> >    label at position x=100, y=100.>
> 
> I believe you'll find that this makes it from hard to impossible
> to work with preprinted stuff, unless you don't explicitely
> denote <draw foo at (x,y)> but do implicitly implement it. I
> think you should at least allow xpos and ypos attributes, as
> hints if you want; these hints could be heeded by say the raw
> text formatter and not by others, but I believe the DTD should
> allow for this.
> 
> Maybe you could leave this out of the DTD, and instead have the
> formatters read <?hints?>, rather like the various DocBook
> processors do; I'd rather we did it like DocBook does it, with a
> "role" tag or somesuch, if you don't want all and any tag to have
> absolute positioning.
> 
> > 3. Some "final" formats we will want to support are:
> >      * PS/PDF
> >      * [...]
> 
> * raw text (with absolute positioning)
> 
> For dotmatrix printers printing onto preprinted fanfold. I don't
> know elsewhere; here in Argentina this is still the preferred
> method for printing invoices and the like.
> 
> Everything else sounds good, or I didn't get it. You choose.
> 
> -- 
> John Lenton (address@hidden) -- Random fortune:
> "Only a brain-damaged operating system would support task switching and not
> make the simple next step of supporting multitasking."
> -- George McFry
> 
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