It's been a few weeks now since the 1.0 release of Ruport and now that
the dust has settled, it seems like a good time to have a roundtable
discussion to see how things are going.
We're mainly hoping to get some feedback and general impressions of
the 1.0 release and talk about the activity in the ruport-util
package. Plus, we want to start thinking about plans for future
releases, so this is a chance to provide some input on the direction
of the project.
Anyone who's interested is welcome to join us at 9pm EDT on Tuesday
(June 12) on the #ruport channel on freenode.
Mike,
Why don't you guy's get off your 'high perch' and write some beginner
to intermediate documentation? I've approached this forum a few times
and always been rebuffed when asking for some understandable examples
or documentation. The term 'arrogant ?' was raised at the last Rails
conference.
I can never understand why you guys' spend so much technical energy on
your products and don't realize they won't be used unless you make
them intellectually available? It's something like Hollywood learned
when sound came out. The user experience is half visual and half
sound.
David
I've approached this forum a few times
and always been rebuffed when asking for some understandable examples
or documentation. The term 'arrogant ?' was raised at the last Rails
conference.
I can never understand why you guys' spend so much technical energy on
your products and don't realize they won't be used unless you make
them intellectually available? It's something like Hollywood learned
when sound came out. The user experience is half visual and half
sound.
Our list is full of people who think we've been pretty kind and
helpful. I'm sorry you had a sour experience, maybe we can be a bit
more constructive and you can come ask some specific questions, and
get some answers, too.
> Mike,
> Why don't you guy's get off your 'high perch' and write some beginner
> to intermediate documentation?
That seemed rather harsh.
The problem I find is that one can spend an enormous amount of time
finding out if some particular app/module/plugin is actually right for
the particular job in hand.
I had a look at the site, and a quick scan of the examples (and
humor). But I was left uncertain if Ruport would do what I wanted. I
have an RoR app, with some printscreens (customer orders etc). Now I
am looking for a better approach and in particular to get pdf files
that can be uploaded for email attachments or stored/printed/faxed
etc.
Most of the examples of Ruports seemed to produce a table as an
output, but what I am looking for is more of a flexible layout (eg,
some fields in various positions on the page, and a couple of
positioned tables and a page header and footer, with multiple page
management.)
Obviously I am prepared to build these as much as necessary, but I
didnt find any documentation that would get me started on layout and
building a page in a RoR app.
Am I looking to do something that is not appropriate for Ruports, or
should I persevere and dig deeper?
The real power of Ruport is not the built in outputs but the rendering
system itself. You will have a much easier time building a formatted
PDF reportwith it than you would with PDF::Writer directly.
That having been said, it's still a low level toolset. You'll be
working with text drawing and geometry methods, you'll need to be able
to do layout geometry, etc.
We'd happily add higher level tools to ruport-util, and are slowly
doing that. (PDF invoices and form helpers)
If you'd like to dig deeper, search the Ruport mailing list archives
and if you have specific questions we'll be happy to help.
Just a reminder, this will start in a little under an hour. Hope to
see you there, there is a lot of great stuff to talk about, and some
of our contributors have things they'd like to get comments on, such
as OOo integration with Ruport.
