[olug] Report Generator

[Eric Penne]

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I have a recurring report that i generate for my clients.  It is not the
same every time.  It has pictures, graphs, sections, text, and various
odds and ends.

I currently generate this report in MSWord to be compatible with my
employer.  We then output it to PDF.  It is very labor intensive to
generate the report when we have to individually select each picture and
insert it then add a caption.  The graphs are in PDF already and we have
to convert them to eps for word to understand.  I really don't want to
run a Word macro to automate this because it will lock this small
company into word even more.  I would love to have a script that would
output the basics into OpenOffice or something else that I could easily
add a cover page and header/footer and save a word 95 doc.  All current
reports open easily with OO.org except have trouble on some of the
tabular data formatting.  The data is still there but the formatting of
hte tables is all out of whack.

I'm looking for suggestions on what programs/languages to implement this
in.  The software that we use to generate the graphs and data always
outputs to PDF.  The data can be easily copied and pasted into a tab
delimited file.  The text describing the tests that were done change
with every test but have the same basic wording to start with.

I would like the script to go into a directory with a group of images
and add them to the document automatically.  It would also add all the
data in a preformatted way.  After that it could add the generic text
and other sections if possible.  The biggest parts though are the
pictures and data formatting.  I've had a few reports that were 100+
pages where only 10 pages were stuff I needed to edit and the rest was
pictures and data that could be added easily enough automatically.  I
spent about 40 man-hours working on that report and 10 of it was putting
in the pictures and the data.  So cutting that 10 hours down to 2 hours
of caption editing would help tremendously.

Any suggestions on languages or other implementations?  Is there an
script that can auto generate OO.org documents?  Is there a good way to
do this (html, postscript, php, etc)?  I'm kind of at a loss for a
starting point but I think this could help my company a lot.

Thanks
Eric Penne

get my key at pgp.mit.edu
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