[RndTbl] Page Layout

Tim Lavoie tim at fractaldragon.net
Tue Jan 30 23:10:14 CST 2007


Dan Martin <ummar143 at 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



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