Re: text formatting question

From: jpd (read_the_sig_at_do.not.spam.it)
Date: 03/27/04 

Date: Sat, 27 Mar 2004 13:40:45 +0000 (UTC)

In article <Xns94B884AB77B3cmiller0470earthlink@207.69.154.201>,
cmiller0470@earthlink.net wrote:
[snip: creating reports from data]
>
> How the heck do I get the resulting information to line up in nice, neat
> columns, such as a management type would like to see?????

un*x has a lot of utilities to help you. Traditional ones include awk(1)
and printf(1)[0]. One of the reasons the language perl got created is
creating nicely formatted reports.

I somehow thought you wanted to create _paper_ reports, for which also a
number of tools are available; from roff(1) and newer versions[1] to
even TeX[2], which is probably overkill. Even more overkill is to
massage the data into Docbook.

As you can see there are a lot of options, but as ObOtherPoster said,
for further tips you'd probably want to supply examples of what you have
and what you'd want.

[0] A command-line interface to printf(3), a C library function. You could
    also write a program in C to generate reports, of course.
[1] nroff, troff, and groff I know of.
[2] And various macro packages to help use it, like LaTeX. 

-- 
  j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l .

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