Re: Competitive Class: Excel_File

On Wed, 06 Nov 2002 21:10:17 +0100 Stijn de Reede <sjr@gmx.co.uk> wrote: > I think this could be a pretty useful class, especially if the feature > to write directly from the database is implemented. I think a lot of > people would want to export data from their website, and excel is a > widely used format. Haven´t looked at the class, but surely something like this is useful. > Exporting data to PDF (even better, being able to subsitute variables in > a pdf file with values, much like a template system) would be much > cooler, but really hard, if not impossible to implement (is this spelled > correctly?). Nah, not impossible. But if you want a real template system based on placeholders, you can´t use a template that is already in PDF format, IMHO. A very common way is to create your templates in TeX, and put some placeholders in them. You could use a standard template class like IT[X] or Smarty to replace them with the actual values. After that, the TeX file has to be converted to a DVI file, which in turn is then converted to PDF. Of course this can use up quite some CPU time and memory. Although you can get some pretty neat results with this, I simply can´t stand TeX... I think it would be way cooler if there existed some kind of PDF conversion tool for OpenOffice documents. As these are nothing but ZIPped XML files, one of the existing template classes could be used for this as well. Or are there other alternatives that I´ve missed? Regards, Markus -- Markus Wolff <wolff@21st.de>