Documatic

[ivanb]

Hi.

I think Documatic is the best reporting tool ever written (and I have
tried many many, too many).

But it would be great if it could also support MS xml office
format.Are there any plans to futher develop ruport in that direction?
I also would like to know if Documatic is still active project.

Bye,ivan

[Gregory Brown]

I can't speak for Dave or Jean-Etienne but it was always my hope that
Energon could be merged into Documatic:
http://rubyforge.org/projects/energon

As far as activity, the underlying engine, Ruport, is currently
dormant but will get active again soon, once I get some necessary work
done on Prawn, and once Andrew France gets rolling on fixes to AAR.
As for Documatic, that's up to Dave.

-greg

--
Technical Blaag at: http://blog.majesticseacreature.com
Non-tech stuff at: http://metametta.blogspot.com
"Ruby Best Practices" Book now in O'Reilly Roughcuts:
http://rubybestpractices.com

[urbanus]

> But it would be great if it could also support MS xml office
> format.Are there any plans to futher develop ruport in that direction?

I don't have any plans myself. Documatic is tightly coupled to the
OpenDocument file format: it has regular expressions to find the
markup styles and to manipulate the surrounding XML, which is all
quite specific. I think it needs to be reliant on specific
OpenDocument tags, otherwise Documatic's special heuristics wouldn't
work (e.g. if you put "Ruby Code" into a table row that contains
nothing but that code, the whole row is removed). Although if you
could draw equivalencies between OpenDocument and Office Open XML etc.
you could separate those regular expressions from the document
compiler, allowing Documatic to handle different "flavours" of XML.
That may or may not work.

Other aspects might be more problematic, such as how the different
file formats treat embedding images, but maybe issues like that can be
solved with different helpers. (You probably know that Documatic
makes it easy to mix in and use helpers for formatting etc.)

The main issue is that I don't consider Office Open XML to be a truly
open standard, and I don't know of any software for Linux to write
OOXML files (OpenOffice.org can read but not write OOXML files
AFAIK). Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

So basically I'm not willing to make Documatic -- which is a free
software product -- dependent on proprietary software and formats. If
someone else wants to do that then fine.

> I also would like to know if Documatic is still active project.

Sort of. I plan to update it in January. There are some minor issues
I need to fix; then I'd like to tidy up a few things like the
documentation, pronounce it "stable", stick version "1.0" on it, put
it into a git repository (on github.com perhaps?) and stop working on
it permanently. Then if anyone else wants to customise, maintain or
improve it they can just fork my copy.


Regards,
Dave

[Ivan Bolčina]

Thanks for info. Again, congratulations for such great library.

2008/11/28 urbanus <urb...@240gl.org>

[Gregory Brown]

On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 11:43 PM, urbanus <urb...@240gl.org> wrote:

>> I also would like to know if Documatic is still active project.
>
> Sort of. I plan to update it in January. There are some minor issues
> I need to fix; then I'd like to tidy up a few things like the
> documentation, pronounce it "stable", stick version "1.0" on it, put
> it into a git repository (on github.com perhaps?) and stop working on
> it permanently. Then if anyone else wants to customise, maintain or
> improve it they can just fork my copy.

Dave, if you want it at github.com/ruport/documatic, that'd be just fine.
This way it'd be listed at github.com/ruport.

Just let me know.