PDF::ReportWriter

The 'simplegroup' PDF, rendered from the example of the same name

PDF-ReportWriter is the reporting module from the Axis project. It creates high-quality PDF output for printing or archiving.

Standard functionality such as unlimited groups with headers and footers are supported. Each footer can contain aggregate functions such as sum(), count(), min(), max().

There are now too many advanced options to list them all here. Scott Mazur has kindly donated a lot of advanced layout options – thanks Scott Here is a selection of what we support ( many more in the POD )…

• Alignment in all directions
• Justification
• Text margins
• Bold and italic text
• Page headers and footers with special tags for %TIME%, %PAGE% and %PAGES%
• Callback support for setting custom colours based on data
• Multi-line text
• Split-cell rendering

Each column can be defined with a fixed-width, in various units, or a relative width ( ie as a percentage of the available page ).

Cosimo Streppone has kindly donated XML Report Definitions support ( as well as some excellent XML demos )

For cases where you really just want to do all rendering yourself, you can define your own function that handles rendering. It will receive the PDF::API2 page, and dimensions of the current cell. You can then do what you want with the page

A wide range of images and scaling options are supported.

Cosimo Streppone has kindly donated BarCode support. Codes 39 and 128 are currently available.

Currently supprted shapes are ‘box’ and ‘ellipse’. A background box is good for rendering a cell in reverse-video – eg you can use a grey background box with white text.