Two for the road, Report from Clerk & Nonstandard Subtotals

[Lerebours, Jose]

Tom Heine posted:

[ snip - very cool & productive stuff ]

> 
> Also, while you are at it, we use something we call destprt 
> for the 2nd half
> of this.  You print the report to a file, and then destprt 
> will either print,email,
> fax, turn it to pdf, turn it to excel, turn it to word doc, 
> or display on screen.
> One nice part is that you run a report, can display it on 
> screen, then decide
> if you want to print, fax,email etc. Every single report in 
> our system runs 
> through this, and an excellent side benefit is that if we 
> need to change 
> something, faxing for instance, we only need to change it in 
> one place.
> 
> Brian White will make the code available to the list if 
> anyone wants it.
>  

All that you describe here sounds exactly the way I run my
reports with a one exception:

    I do not use PUTENV.  I dump everything on a field in
    the point-of-reference (or stand) file, pass @rn as a 
    parameter and then read the field from -v and finally,
    use mid() to parse it.  I like the PUTENV approach, less
    room for error - Using mid() can mess things up if you
    do not get the positions right.

I too print to file and then give option to redirect output
to an additional output device (mail, fax, or printer).  Now,
what really got my attention about your post is the ability
to convert document to any of the listed formats.  If I am not
misreading your post, it appears that you can convert document
from PCL to excel, PDF, fax, mail, etc. ... Now, that, I would
like to know more about.

While I can produce most of these (I am having the heck of
a problem with the PDF - more about this later), I cannot 
or do not know how, create an excel without having to re-run
the report.  Of course, this is NOT an option for posting
routines.  Actually, in my case, if the devices are NOT 
compatible or same type, I re-run the report.  By compatible
I mean, of same printer type as set in the filePro printer
table (need printer codes to be reloaded for newly chosen
printer) and if after printing you want to mail it, need to
strip PCL codes (I think I came across a script that strips
PCL codes out so I might have a solution for this now).

PDF documents, however, have become a pain in my ears.  I have
downloaded and installed several programs from our friend
BKW web page.  I installed JP suggested program (Brian, thanks
for your well detail post last week) and I have also installed
ImageMagick but I cannot get them to work - I keep on getting
errors when running 'convert' 

No built-in fonts found during initialization
convert: Delegate failed `"pcl6" -dNOPAUSE -dAlignToPixels=0 -dBATCH -dSAFER -sD
EVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile="%o" "%i"'.

How exactly are your creating your PDF documents?

Regards;


Jose Lerebours