Report generation tool

[Schug, Eric C (SAIC)]

After spending some effort evaluating the Matlab report generator, I found
it very
awkward to use. So I a spend a few days coming up with a simple solution,
which
I think could be easily ported to octave. Like most unix based solutions it
uses
a few simple tools to create a more complex tool. In this case I use matlab
to generate the report data and APT for generating the document. Matlab was
chosen, because it what I use at work for analysis, and APT was chosen,
because it is easy to use (see www.xmlmind.com/aptconvert.html). I first
created a template tool that has both commands and document intermixed. I
indicate command lines by adding a # to the front. All other lines are
treated as APT document format, but with one addition, if a #% tag occurs in
the line then everything before the tag gets sprintf style % conversion and
everthing after is treated as data for the conversion.
For example:
  one plus one equals %d, or %s. #%{2,'two'}

would output the following line in APT format
  one plus one equals 2, or two.

Then I have a separate tool that collects the data for the report.  Next, I
convert the template into a document by first converting it to a temporary
script then run the script which generates the document in APT format.
Finally, I convert the APT document to postcript, PDF or other format using
aptconvert.
If others would like this tool I can make it available (GPLed), but someone
would need to convert from Matlab it to octave, I don't have the time right
now.

Eric Schug



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