Print formatting

[Greg Hall]

Hi,

can anyone advise on print formatting utilities or products (3rd-party or otherwise) available for Unix systems. I have a client who produces old style monochrome text reports. They have a need to produce something sexier, more 21st century type reports. Is there a product that might process their old ascii reports into something new and flash.

thanks, Greg

[A. Clay Stephenson]

By far the best product that I have found for this is UnForm. www.unform.com. The idea is that it takes ASCII input and does pattern matchings such as "Trial Balance" at line 3, position 30 and when it finds the first match it applies the appropriate set of "rules". You can get color, images, fonts, barcodes, duplexing, shading ... all from plain text input. It comes with powerful programming features so that you can erase data, move data, read data into variables. If no match is found, no rules are applied, and then the input text is simply passed to output unchanged.