Is BIRT a good solution

bmi

Hello BIRT guys,<br />
<br />
Need some help for making decision what reporting-solution to use.<br />
<br />
environment notes:<br />
A customer (small bank) wants to replace his Reporting-Tool (ISIS Papyrus). It is only used for PDF-creation and templating.<br />
They want to change to something less proprietary and shift the knowledge/work to the JAVA-Developers.<br />
<br />
Since the PDF's that goes to customers (about 8000 bank-customer) are visually fine, they'd like to keep appearance the same.<br />
So now i've got a bunch of things the actual software can and i don't know how good BIRT is meeting those reqs.<br />
<br />
If some of the pros easily can answer some of these, that would help a lot.<br />
<br />
<ul class='bbc'><li> are whaterproof signs possible (for Example "TEST" or "Copy")?</li><li> Having more Pagenumber ranges in one report? (restart numbering)</li><li> Are PDF indextables possible -> Bookmarks?</li><li> is the Version PDF/A supported?</li><li> does a word-wrap logic exist? (allow wrap in a long word at a specific point with "-" sign)</li><li> forcing words to be on the same line? (expression "a la carte" always in the same line)</li><li> is inline formatting possible? (having italic word inside textelement)</li><li> is dynamic font-size possible? (adjust font-size at runtime when number does not fit in table-cell)</li><li> having 3 languages in one template (table-header etc.) - whats the best approach do realize that?</li><li> How flexible is jasper in defining when to shift data sections to a new page? (and carry-over values?)</li><li> Are there any benchmarks comparison to BIRT, Crystal etc.? (mid complex Report -> 3500 Pages)</li></ul>
<br />
<br />
thx

CBR

hi,

i m trying to answer some (not all) of your questions:

1) are whaterproof signs possible (for Example "TEST" or "Copy")?
- What are whaterproof signs? Do you mean watermarks? Watermarks are possible but you have to use background images to add them to a document. So you have to create a image per watermark. It is not possible to enter a text somewhere that is beeing used as a watermark.

3)Are PDF indextables possible -> Bookmarks?
- Yes. You can create PDF Bookmarks within a PDF report per report item but you can't decide about how the Bookmarks are nested (BIRT nests Bookmarks in PDF automatically reflecting your current design)

4) is the Version PDF/A supported?
- BIRT 3.7 generates PDF files matching PDF version 1.5 but the PDF files are not tagged. You have to write your own emitter that outputs to PDF and satisfies your needs if you can't use the standard emitter (it is not possible to change configuration of standard emitter).

5) does a word-wrap logic exist?
- BIRT can't wrap a single word to multiple lines because BIRT doesn't even know about the language beeing used. If you have a very long sentence BIRT will wrap the scentence to multiple lines but it is only able to add a linefeed at the end of a word but not in between a word.

6) forcing words to be on the same line? (expression "a la carte" always in the same line)
- If this expression is within the same element you can tell BIRT to not wrap the whole element. What you want sounds like you are having a large text and don't want to have special sentences to be wrapped inside this text. This is not possible using BIRT

7) is dynamic font-size possible?
- Yes. You can adjust the font size within the report by writing a short Java snippet that calculates the font size to be used, but there is no automatism.

8) in BIRT you can have one report (template) that you translate to multiple languages.