Simulating a spreadsheet in PCL?

[JJ]

Hi folks,

Hoping someone out there will have some tips or tricks for me. Or can
direct me in the right direction.

I'd like to be able to read in a CSV file that my system creates into a PCL
file and somehow simulate the cells that you would see in an Excel
spreadsheet. In other words, I need the little cells/boxes around the
numerical data or it will be just too hard to read.

If I can get this data into some sort of PCL "grid", I can convert that to
PDF and my users would be much happier with the PDF files vs. the CSV files
they get now. Even though the current CSV opens into Excel with no problem.
They much prefer the manual PDF files I was making daily. But this job now
runs seven days a week and I can't always be sitting AT my desk to make the
file manually at the same time every day of my life. So, I automated it but
at the time, could only create a CSV for them.

Can anyone direct me on how best to create "cells" or boxes in PCL around
data like this?

Thx in advance, JJ

 

[JJ]

Wow, very interesting. Thx! JJ

It's not too difficult to generate your own pdf's from the raw
numeric data. See the nice pdf introduction by Kas Thomas,
http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.15/15.09/PDFIntro/index.html

 

[ted]

Hi folks,

Hoping someone out there will have some tips or tricks for me. Or can
direct me in the right direction.

I'd like to be able to read in a CSV file that my system creates into a PCL
file and somehow simulate the cells that you would see in an Excel
spreadsheet. In other words, I need the little cells/boxes around the
numerical data or it will be just too hard to read.

If I can get this data into some sort of PCL "grid", I can convert that to
PDF and my users would be much happier with the PDF files vs. the CSV files
they get now. Even though the current CSV opens into Excel with no problem.
They much prefer the manual PDF files I was making daily. But this job now
runs seven days a week and I can't always be sitting AT my desk to make the
file manually at the same time every day of my life. So, I automated it but
at the time, could only create a CSV for them.

Can anyone direct me on how best to create "cells" or boxes in PCL around
data like this?

Thx in advance, JJ

Don't know about PCL programming, but if you were doing it by hand (on
Windows), you can automate it with "autoit3". I used it on a few
projects, and it's not too hard to pick up and it's free:

http://www.autoitscript.com/site/autoit/

(You could probably also script OpenOffice to open a csv and print it to
a PDF from a shell script or batch file)

 

[JJ]

Don't know about PCL programming, but if you were doing it by hand (on
Windows), you can automate it with "autoit3". I used it on a few
projects, and it's not too hard to pick up and it's free:

http://www.autoitscript.com/site/autoit/

(You could probably also script OpenOffice to open a csv and print it to
a PDF from a shell script or batch file)

Thanks for the info. I'm not able to install new s/w to this server. So, I
need to do this w/ the tool we already have. We already convert 100's of
PCL files to PDF daily so I can use that existing function. I was just
hoping for some help with the PCL commands to maybe make a grid. Thanks
again! JJ