Re: Producing Nice Prints

[swampyankee]

My first idea was to generate a pdf and print this.

Did you look into anything else? Plain text? HTML? Excel? or another spreadheet?

Is there an easier way?

Always ;-)

You will need to be a trifle more forthcoming with information. Some databases, e.g., Oracle, have report-generating features. These may be adequate. What operating system? Is the output of a plain text file adequate? If so, format may be adequate.

There are several modules for creating PDF (see PDF); I'd tend to use PDF::API2 or PDF::CreateSimple.

However, my preference would be to generate HTML. This is for a couple of reasons, one is that if this is only going to be done once or twice, it may be easier to fix minor errors by directly editing the HTML, instead of editing the program, re-running the report generation, etc.

[roboticus]

I'll also mention Excel ... the advantages are that:
• There's a good package on CPAN to create the spreadsheets that gives you an easy way to do your headings & such.
• A spreadsheet is more flexible than a PDF--the users may reuse the data, or extend the spreadsheet if needed.

...roboticus