>We have even thought of sending the report to an HPGL printer and capturing
>the output. The problem is HPGL viewers are not always of high quality and
>we don't have the time or desire to write our own and there is some system
>setup involved that the hardware group is not to hip on.

If you've seriously considered the HPGL route (interesting I must say) you might want to take a look at Adobe Acrobat which could probably be implemented along the same lines but with a lot more of the work already done for you. You print to it like a printer and create PDF files. PDF readers are royalty free and come in 2 flavors, a standalone version and one that is a plug in to a web browser. If you can store it in Lotus as a file attach you could probably have the user double click on the icon in their Notes application and have the standalone Acrobat Reader fire up and open the file.

Drawbacks are you will have to have the full Acrobat package set up on the machine you are producing the reports on & one of the readers installed and set up on workstations where reports are to be read. Also, automation of the report creation process can be done but requires hacking (stuffing keyboard buffer, etc). Considering automation for certain tasks may require more resources than you can commit to this feature, can you trust your users to do the right thing with the PDF file once they generate it?

Advantages are the readers are easily available. PDF files are fairly efficient ways to move documents around (better than a BMP, plus you could blow up a PDF file and not lose resolution (in theory)).

Check out:
http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/acrobat/devwhitepaper.html
For info on integrating the reading of PDF files into you application.


I have talked to someone who successfully did this to distribute reports to managers via the web. They wanted managers to use web browsers to view a batch of reports that was created every month instead of sending out binders of printed reports. They were going to go with straight HTML but formatting capabilities of regular HTML leaves a lot to be desired. Also the company wanted to use the Fox report writer instead of coding their own HTML report generation procedures. He created the reports in Fox, printed to PDF files, and posted the information to the web. The thing that kept helped him out the most was that there were only a few workstations set up to generate the Fox reports and create the PDF files. If the creation of these PDF files was spread out to more client applications you'll have more software to install and maintain (and license?)