Re: Next assignment - Reports

[Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

It seems to me that no single tool will work for all reports, all 
end-users, all runtime environments, and all developers.  Even with HTML 
and PDF formats available, spool files still have their place, even if 
for nothing more than printing receipts for over-the-counter 
transactions.

Another avenue that I'd like to explore would be generating HTML stream 
files from RPG programs using something like CGIDEV2, then converting 
the HTML file to a PDF document as an option.

I have docuPrinter installed on my PC, which allows me to convert HTML 
files to PDF documents, but I'd like to explore server based products 
and options that can be evoked from batch jobs.

I've read about a number of open-source Java and Python solutions for 
converting HTML to PDF files.  IBM Developer Works is a good place to 
start.  It would be nice to pass a couple parameters (HTML file name, 
PDF file name) from an RPG program and evoke some utility to convert the 
HTML file to PDF.

Any suggestions?

Nathan.