Re: Dynamic page lengths in reports

Alan Goodman (alan@dssmktg.com) wrote: : Greetings people, : We write reports for our customers that must be able to handle being : printed on various and sundry printers with different page lengths and : orientations. ... stuff deleted : What we really would like is some dynamic way of telling informix the page : length of a report at runtime. Then we could take advantage of all the : cool reporting functions like page header and page trailer, etc. : (Informix, are you listening? This would be a REALLY nice enhancement!!!!) : Thanks for listening (reading). Does anyone else have really cool ways of : handling this problem? I had the even bigger problem of needing to handle different sized fonts too. My solution was to go to a page length of 1, and generate *roff output. This was I didn't have worry about doing the page layout myself and I had access to lot of fancy printer effects. Also, I can decided on the page size or the printing device after generating the report, by changing the header to the roff source and the arguments to the roff command. Therefore, I can format the report first as simple ascii for viewing on the screen and then reformat it for my PCL printer. Or, I can save the report in a file nd decide which printer I want to print it on later. The tbl preprocessor is wonderful for laying out reports. I use the GNU groff version of *roff. -- Martin Andrews andrewm@ccfadm.eeg.ccf.org Dept. of Neurology Phone (216)444-7485 Cleveland Clinic Foundation Fax (216)445-6617