Which document type will give me the best forms output?

November 14, 2006 10:31 AM

What is the best format/document choice for printing out structured and stylized data that is being fed out of a database? HTML/CSS is too restrictive in terms of formatting, text overflow, and it isn't easy to change. PDF creates documents that are too large. One developer suggested RTF. Is there a alternate/better/best choice that we should look at?

We have a fairly large database that is fed via a web interface. We have an intranet site where forms/documents are fed from information from the database. We have a high degree of control over software that is available on the client machines, but I'd like to avoid a major install across our entire user base. They currently have windows machines with standard office software. We are standardized on IE with a mix of versions.

Precise formatting for printing is important. The ability to easily change/add pages and accommodate overflow text that spills into additional pages while still enforcing page breaks in other areas of the document is important. We currently have a very precisely styled web page, but we find it limiting in terms of dealing with overflow text and adding/removing pages easily. We also have a few government documents that are printed out via PDF, but when we've tried to add some of our other documents to the PDF it quickly grows quite large.

Is there some better format that we should be looking at?

posted by willnot to computers & internet (7 comments total)

You don't say whether you've looked specifically into the print-media flavor of CSS. A List Apart has an article on using CSS to style a book. If you have, pardon the interruption.

I imagine RTF would work. The main drawback to that is that it's hard to look at and debug, though this is a problem for PDFs as well.
posted by adamrice at 10:59 AM on November 14, 2006

Have you considered DocBook? By creating one single xml document you can then generate a) a single html page layout, b) a multi-page html page layout and c) a pdf version. I started using it after I saw how well Hibernate was using it. Though I have no experience with it, apparently you can publish to RTF, too.
posted by funkiwan at 12:42 PM on November 14, 2006

Tex? Dynamically create it and then run it through tex and the output is infinitely manipulatable. Only downside is that it's a little hard to learn.

It can output PDF for printing, as well if you need other formats, there are converters for everything imaginable.
posted by cschneid at 1:35 PM on November 14, 2006

PDF is pretty much the only format you want if you want pixel precise layouts.

PDF files are not all large, I've created on-the-fly PDF files (invoices) out of database data that end up being ~5-10k.
posted by mphuie at 2:52 PM on November 14, 2006

What did you use to create the PDFs? I happen to be working on a database driven PDF engine right now using a port of FPDF. The files shouldn't be large unless you've got a lot of high res images

http://www.fpdf.org/
posted by nonmyopicdave at 3:31 PM on November 14, 2006

TeX or LaTeX will be worth the effort it takes to learn when it comes to printing precision. Even more so when you find you need to control flow and page breaks. TeX for the Impatient and The Not So Short Introduction to LATEX 2ε are good references which are freely available.
posted by ijoshua at 5:41 PM on November 14, 2006

Generate PDFs or SVGs. They're only a few kB, if you don't include a bunch of bloaty rasters.
posted by Netzapper at 8:29 PM on November 14, 2006