From: Dave Thomas <dave@...>
Date: 2002-12-28T06:34:21+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby & Preprinted forms - will they work together?

On Fri, 2002-12-27 at 15:11, John Reed wrote:
> I'm a Ruby newbie, but I've decided to write a commercial application
> using Ruby. This application needs the capability to print on a
> pre-printed form. Can Ruby do this?
> 
> I've been writing it in Lotus Notes, but I will need to spend a
> considerable amount of money for software that will standardize the
> print, regardless of the printer. Writing it in Ruby, using FXRuby and
> FreeRIDE, will give me some great experience with Ruby.

This might not appeal unless you have some TeX experience, but I've had
a lot of luck generating fairly complex financial forms (multi-page
invoices, statements, and so on) using Ruby. The approach I take is to
have the Ruby code generate all the values, and then call a templating
library (actually the one I wrote for RDoc) to substitute those values
into a LaTeX document. I then format this, and present the results to
the end user as PDFs. I write a fairly simple style sheet for each
document type, and the templates invoke macros in these style sheets.
Using LaTeX (TeX) gives me precise control over positioning of the
fields on the paper.


Cheers


Dave