Tim:
Thanks for the suggestion. I am now thinking of using pdf, since I am not breaking any laws by using it, so it sure would be nice to have a library of pdf functions.
It has been a while since I have used Lisp. I must admit, it would not have been the first thing I would have thought of.
-Dan
Tim Lavoie wrote:
Dan Martin ummar143@cc.umanitoba.ca writes:
I need to take a list of medications, display it on a screen which will allow a user to edit the list, and print it in a number of different forms (list for the patient, a hospital progress note, prescription pads). The printed forms have lines, etc, and could have geometric figures such as a logo. The input will likely be in XML.
The display could be done with XHTML. The printed forms could be done using LaTeX commands, but I imagine it would be painful to program. I could learn postscript. I assume Acrobat's pdf is proprietary and cannot be used. I have heard of an XML based page layout language, and such a solution would lend itself to an XSLT transformation.
Does anyone have suggestions?
Hi Dan,
It might be good to ask if this has to integrate with existing software at all, as there might be constraints there.
There are probably quite a few choices, but a couple of Common Lisp libraries would fit very nicely. The first is cl-typesetting, which as the name indicates, is for program-based typesetting of documents and reports. Its companion, cl-pdf, generates PDF output directly.
Links:
http://www.fractalconcept.com/asp/cl-typesetting http://www.fractalconcept.com/asp/cl-pdf http://www.fractalconcept.com/ex.pdf (Example PDF)
The same author has also created a very nice mod-lisp package to interface with Apache, should a web interface be desired.
Lisp might be odd to some, but if you're already thinking of XML, you're really most of the way there.
Cheers, Tim