Pretty Printing (maybe with PDFs ?)

[colin]

Hello, perhaps someone can help me. I'm in the process of updating some
in-house software written in Perl. The printing feature currently
prints out reports in tried-and-true monospaced ASCII text. I would
like to update this a tad, using some different fonts/styles and some
boxes/lines, maybe even add a little color such as our department's
..eps logo and a bitmapped graph or two. My first thought was to look
for a graphics generation library (like GD)... but at 600 dpi, that
would make for some huge page-sized bitmapped images! Then I thought
about hand rolling some Postscript. Now I'm thinking maybe PDF via some
sort of support module. Has anyone else trekked this route before? I'm
a PS and PDF newbie from the coding side of things! What do you
suggest? I'm leaning towards something that uses Postscript and/or PDF,
that way I can dump the generated file right to the printer and keep my
code as OS agnostic as possible.

Thanks in advance for any pointers!

 

[Shawn Corey]

Hello, perhaps someone can help me. I'm in the process of updating some
in-house software written in Perl. The printing feature currently
prints out reports in tried-and-true monospaced ASCII text. I would
like to update this a tad, using some different fonts/styles and some
boxes/lines, maybe even add a little color such as our department's
.eps logo and a bitmapped graph or two. My first thought was to look
for a graphics generation library (like GD)... but at 600 dpi, that
would make for some huge page-sized bitmapped images! Then I thought
about hand rolling some Postscript. Now I'm thinking maybe PDF via some
sort of support module. Has anyone else trekked this route before? I'm
a PS and PDF newbie from the coding side of things! What do you
suggest? I'm leaning towards something that uses Postscript and/or PDF,
that way I can dump the generated file right to the printer and keep my
code as OS agnostic as possible.

Thanks in advance for any pointers!

I use PDF::API2 for creating PDF in Perl. I recommend you download the
developer's version PDF-API2-0.40_77

If you need more help with it, subscribe to the mailing list:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/perl-text-pdf-modules/

--- Shawn

 

[Michele Dondi]

Hello, perhaps someone can help me. I'm in the process of updating some
in-house software written in Perl. The printing feature currently
prints out reports in tried-and-true monospaced ASCII text. I would
like to update this a tad, using some different fonts/styles and some
boxes/lines, maybe even add a little color such as our department's
.eps logo and a bitmapped graph or two. My first thought was to look
for a graphics generation library (like GD)... but at 600 dpi, that
would make for some huge page-sized bitmapped images! Then I thought
about hand rolling some Postscript. Now I'm thinking maybe PDF via some
sort of support module. Has anyone else trekked this route before? I'm
a PS and PDF newbie from the coding side of things! What do you
suggest? I'm leaning towards something that uses Postscript and/or PDF,
that way I can dump the generated file right to the printer and keep my
code as OS agnostic as possible.

What about using pdfLaTeX+listings.sty?!?


HTH,
Michele