Re: [groff] Groff & tbl as a report generator

[John Gardner]

Hi Blake, great to hear! Always nice to hear another Troff success story. =)

I know the feeling about finding decent PDF converters. The best one I know
of is wkhtmltopdf <https://wkhtmltopdf.org/>, which uses WebKit's rendering
engine to convert an HTML/CSS-enriched webpage into  a correctly-layered
and paged PDF. Tables looked great and scaled perfectly across pages.

I strongly recommend wkhtmltopdf <https://wkhtmltopdf.org/> to anybody else
who finds themselves in need of a decent HTML-to-PDF converter.

On 25 July 2018 at 03:26, Blake McBride <address@hidden> wrote:

> A few years ago I thought of a really, really good use for groff and tbl.
> Thought I'd share.
>
> I write (web-based) business applications.  Often I have to generate
> reports which largely mean PDF files.  In the past, I used some open-source
> PDF generation utilities.  They worked, but what a nightmare!  Handling
> paging and lining everything up took hours.
>
> Then, a few years ago, I thought of generating groff/tbl input instead and
> then calling those tools to generate the final PDF output.  This made my
> ability to produce reports skyrocket.  I have a deep love of troff but
> don't get to use it as much as I'd like.  Now I'll be using it all of the
> time.
>
> This is a great use of groff et al.   I will be using it all of the time
> now!
>
> Blake McBride
>