Re: [groff] Groff & tbl as a report generator

[Blake McBride]

Thanks.  I've seen a tool or two that converts HTML to PDF in the past but
I immediately shied away from them for the following reasons.

1. I figured HTML was just too loosey-goosey with the layout.  I wanted
better control.

2.  I figured HTML didn't deal with paging and repeating page headers,
column titles, and page numbers on each page.

Am I wrong?

I have to say, groff/tbl fits the bill well.

Thanks!

Blake


On Tue, Jul 24, 2018 at 1:15 PM John Gardner <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hi Blake, great to hear! Always nice to hear another Troff success story.
> =)
>
> I know the feeling about finding decent PDF converters. The best one I
> know of is wkhtmltopdf <https://wkhtmltopdf.org/>, which uses WebKit's
> rendering engine to convert an HTML/CSS-enriched webpage into  a
> correctly-layered and paged PDF. Tables looked great and scaled perfectly
> across pages.
>
> I strongly recommend wkhtmltopdf <https://wkhtmltopdf.org/> to anybody
> else who finds themselves in need of a decent HTML-to-PDF converter.
>
> On 25 July 2018 at 03:26, Blake McBride <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> A few years ago I thought of a really, really good use for groff and tbl.
>> Thought I'd share.
>>
>> I write (web-based) business applications.  Often I have to generate
>> reports which largely mean PDF files.  In the past, I used some
>> open-source
>> PDF generation utilities.  They worked, but what a nightmare!  Handling
>> paging and lining everything up took hours.
>>
>> Then, a few years ago, I thought of generating groff/tbl input instead and
>> then calling those tools to generate the final PDF output.  This made my
>> ability to produce reports skyrocket.  I have a deep love of troff but
>> don't get to use it as much as I'd like.  Now I'll be using it all of the
>> time.
>>
>> This is a great use of groff et al.   I will be using it all of the time
>> now!
>>
>> Blake McBride
>>
>
>