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Users who receive reports often want to distribute these reports to a wider audience via email in order to share information. In the process of doing this, they may want to first edit the report to include additional information and commentary. The user wants to export the report to a common format such as MS Word, make the edits and then distribute the Word document. In this scenario, the user wants a conveniently accessible export of the report, including layout, that they can then edit, read and email at their convenience. HTML output is usually not adequate in this scenario since it is not as easy to distribute large reports in HTML via email. For usability, the receiver of the email would rather access the document as an MS Office file. PDF is often not an option since the user wants to make edits to the file. The Rich Text Format (RTF) emitter would approximate the look and spacing of elements in the original report using the capabilities of the RTF markup language. RTF documents can easily be read by a number of word processors, including MS Word.
Hi, we are very interested in this feature. Are there any plannings when this will be available? Stefan
(In reply to comment #1) > we are very interested in this feature. Are there any plannings when this will > be available? Hi, I also want to express my interrest for this feature. I currently write the reports that must be editable in some word processing app myself utilizing the iText library, but would love to completely move to BIRT even for these cases.
assign to investigate for a future release
Hi, are there any plannings now about this future release? I saw that 2.0M3 needs iText.jar. And iText can export RTF.
Stephan, thanks for the pointer, can you comment on how easy to reuse the code for PDF gen to generate RTF? Is it just a output format setting in iText?
I haven't used iText myself. I only know that is able to create RTF files. Please take a look at the documentation of iText: http://itextdocs.lowagie.com/tutorial/#part7 and http://itextdocs.lowagie.com/tutorial/rtf/index.html#rtfpackage Hope that helps.
It appears that iText uses a different writer class and API to generate RTF. Need help on resource to research/code this a BIRT RTF emitter.
Can you please give us some more information what you have/want to do and how we can help you?
Hello, Could you add this feature for birt 2.1 release ? This would be awesome. Dom (In reply to comment #3) > assign to investigate for a future release > (In reply to comment #0) > Users who receive reports often want to distribute these reports to a wider > audience via email in order to share information. In the process of doing > this, they may want to first edit the report to include additional information > and commentary. The user wants to export the report to a common format such as > MS Word, make the edits and then distribute the Word document. > > In this scenario, the user wants a conveniently accessible export of the > report, including layout, that they can then edit, read and email at their > convenience. > > HTML output is usually not adequate in this scenario since it is not as easy > to distribute large reports in HTML via email. For usability, the receiver of > the email would rather access the document as an MS Office file. PDF is often > not an option since the user wants to make edits to the file. > > The Rich Text Format (RTF) emitter would approximate the look and spacing of > elements in the original report using the capabilities of the RTF markup > language. RTF documents can easily be read by a number of word processors, > including MS Word.
Just checking for any update on the Target Milestone for this enhancement. Last comment was 2006-02-13; it is now 2006-05-18. Is there any update on estimated Target Milestone? 2.1? (end of June 2006?) Or Post-2.1? (2.2+?) Part of my reporting requirements include the ability for users to modify/tweak the report before publishing. The ability to Export to .RTF or .DOC would help me greatly.
Created attachment 42971 [details] Proposal for an emitter to Word format (BPS 41) Inetsoft propose to implement an emitter for exporting BIRT reports to MSWord format. The proposal calls for a new emitter to support exporting to WordprocessingML files, which is supported by Word 2003 and later. Although the proposal is slightly different from the request for RTF support, it serves the same needs and is more forward looking in supporting new versions of the office software.
This functionality is very much needed. A few comments on the spec though: - I assume this export will be made available through the Report Engine API. A common use case is for somebody to run a report normally in a browser, then want to click an "Export" button to get the report exported. Ideally this should work without re-executing the report (and queries). Putting this into the Engine API will make it usable by those who don't use the BIRT viewer. The API should not be tied to Word, but include a "export format" field, so it can be used with other export formats as they are added. - Would it be possible to design the emitter so the XML generation module is replaceable? This would enable somebody to write an Open Document format XML module that reuses much of the work being done by this project. - Another very much needed export is to Excel. Being able to extract data from a report and then work on it in a spreadsheet is perhaps more commonly needed than a document. Again, anything that can be done in the design of this emitter to enable future re-use would be worthwhile. I'm looking forward to this!
The emitter will be part of the engine and will be accessible from the web interface per servlet integration. Since the emitter will be part of the public api, the xml generation will be exposed as such and can be overriden to support other formats such as open document. I didn't explicitly specify the XML output as a separate module but we will take that into consideration as part of the detailed design/implementation. Excel export is quite different from word in that it requires a different layout mode, and there is a separate request for it. Discussed this in the PMC meeting and it will be considered separately.
Some comments - * Hyperlinks should behave like the PDF emitter in that if report A contains a link to a report B and the link specifies that report A is to be output in PDF, then clicking on the link in the PDF brings up the PDF of the report B. In other words, the PDF emitter does NOT always point to HTML output. * It would be nice if instead of the WordprocessingML emitter I could plug in an XSLT file and be able to determine the XML output I wanted- something along the lines of the Open Doc XML emitter. Not sure if this is possible architecturally. XML output is the project suited for this I suppose. * It would be nice if there was a way to specify the type of image (JPG/PNG/etc.) that a chart is rendered into. * Printing: images should be rendered with the DPI necessary to make the word file print images well. * IDE Integration: export from the previewer is being recommended. However, you can preview directly to PDF which does not present a toolbar to export. My vote is to add a new menu item to the File menu as well as to the preview button to say, "View as Word". In addition, in the previewer toolbar, it would be nice to Export to Word as a button.
Export to word has been added in 2.2.2. schedule to 2.3 to consider some of the enhancements suggested in the bugzilla.
defer to 2.5 for the enhancment: * Printing: images should be rendered with the DPI necessary to make the word file print images well.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 237426 ***
Verified as duplicated one, will track in #237426
