From: Gregory Brown <gregory.t.brown@...>
Date: 2007-04-28T03:49:26+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:

> Naturally, it would be ideal if there were general intermediary data
> format or document format.
> The best bet is often XML since we're talking about fundamentally
> generated styled documents from a structured document, but of course
> it all depends where that data is coming from and where it might go
> and how much overhead is really practical for functionality needs
> today and future functionality needs. Ideally if it is a valid xhtml
> document, that should be more translatable to pdf.

I had very seriously considered integrating XML/Fo as I figured that'd
let people use heavy weight tools like FOP and possibly other stuff to
do complex rendering.

I scratched it off as 'too much work' to do between now and May 15th,
and the project I was planning on doing that depended on FOP got
pushed backwards.  It's possible that you might see this support in
Ruport eventually, or as a gem_plugin, or in ruport-util.

I'd likely accept a well written patch which generates XML/Fo for our
four standard renderers
(Row,Table,Group,Grouping) and put it directly in Ruport.  So if
anyone out there is looking for a project, I'd be happy to help you
work on that...