From: Gregory Brown <gregory.t.brown@...>
Date: 2007-04-27T23:30:32+09:00
Subject: Re: Looking for thoughts and opinions on Ruport, and reporting in Ruby in general.

On 4/27/07, John Joyce <dangerwillrobinsondanger@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Apr 27, 2007, at 10:59 PM, Gregory Brown wrote:
> > > This does often seem to be the case.  Usually when that fails, I
> > change one word in my Ruport code to switch to HTML.   If that doesn't
> > work, I switch to PDF but then I don't have CSS so I need to roll up
> > my sleeves a bit.  (Getting Much Better though!)
>
> What do you mean by "... I don't have CSS..."??

Well the easiest way for me to make a formatted report from Ruport if
I get a 'But can I make that blue' comment is output vanilla HTML and
then tweak the CSS to do the formatting.

However, if we need printable reports, I need to move to PDF stuff.
Ruport's support has gotten a lot better, we have a ton of helper
functions that provide in some cases simplified interfaces and in
other cases just delegators to PDF::Writer.

So we have methods like these:

* @add_text@ - adds text to your output
* @center_image_in_box@ - takes a path to an image file and centers it
within boundaries you specify
* @rounded_text_box@ - draw text surrounded by a rounded-corner box
* @watermark@ - places a centered watermark on each page of your report
* @move_cursor@ - moves cursor specified number of units along the y-axis
* @move_cursor_to@ - moves cursor to a specified location on the y-axis
* @pad@ - adds a specified amount of space above and below some output
* @pad_top@ - adds a specified amount of space above some output
* @pad_bottom@ - adds a specified amount of space below some output
* @draw_table@ - uses PDF::SimpleTable to draw a table to output
* @horizontal_line@ - draw a horizontal line
* @vertical_line@ - draw a vertical line
* @left_boundary@ - get the left boundary of the page
* @right_boundary@ - get the right boundary of the page
* @top_boundary@ - get the top boundary of the page
* @bottom_boundary@ - get the bottom boundary of the page
* @cursor@ - get the current location of the cursor on the y-axis
* @draw_text@ - places text at a specified position on the page

And it's up to us to make it look pretty.  Compare these two
formatters, to see what I mean:
http://pastie.caboo.se/57062