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If python is an option, look at Reportlab. I have no affiliation, but i have used to generate recipe cards from a web based app after fetching the data from a DB.

If I understand your requirements correctly, you may want to investigate the use of Python (in the form of Apache's mod_python) along with the ReportLab tools.
You can find a nice article detailing its usage here

This is just as wrong as if a country mandated 80% Microsoft. Mandate open file formats and protocols, but don't mandate people or agencies MUST use a specific type of software.

Why have I a feeling you aren't a system administrator? Can't you imagine the chaos if some government/company would use different software down to not only the different departments, but the individuals? Where the software does the same job, so there's no reason to use different software.

I can see the average support call:

"Hey, I was going to send my PowerPoint presentation to the guys at (some place), but they're using something they call PythonPoint and can't open my PPT files. What should I do now?"

Then one could of course recommend the guy to save it as a PDF with PDFWriter, which would give him basically the same thing as what PythonPoint would generate (a PDF). But then he would only be able to edit the presentation at his PowerPoint machine since PythonPoint use XML as input format. And they'd have to cross their fingers if the Windows PDF happened to be generated in a way for PythonPoint's extended PDF viewer to offer its full functionality.

So the company would probably quickly decide "Hey, let's all use PowerPoint or PythonPoint for increased flexibility and not have to install both software on some demo computers since different departments could've used different software". They'd also save education costs since they would have to worry about one less software.

And I think that's what the Brazil government already did...

The format itself isn't sufficient for many domains -- I rather dislike PDF-only documentation, and indexing and searching is sufficient but not great. But I get the impression that the format itself is fairly transparent, and while Adobe has not been a good owner, PDF is doing pretty well. However, it does show that an "open" format doesn't mean much until there's actual competing products, and it's taken a long time to get that for PDF -- it will likely be the same for other "open" standards that have proprietary roots.

I just use Python and ReportLab for generating reports.

open source and very nice
www.reportlab.com
Check the demos.
Really, it's cool

If you use Python, you might want to have a look at ReportLab, a nice open-source PDF generation library.

Imagine a utility that would convert your docs to a crossplatform (*NIX, MacOS, Win32) information container - one that would allow true device and platform independance, as well as allow internal and external hyperlinking, presentation-style slideshows, full Unicode support, and it should be an open standard.

What would this magic format be called? PDF, maybe?

There is already at least one OSS engine for directly creating PDF without using any Adobe products, either:ReportLab

Call me a luddite, but I'm not certain what YAFF will provide in the long run, other than splintering the non-.DOC users further. Adobe may be an evil, greedy, closed-source corporation, but PDF as a file spec is open and documented. Also current viewer products have no troubles (that I've seen) with much older versions of the file format. PDF allows for indexing of documents for fast searches, bookmark creation for a table of contents/index, thumbnail creation for quick navigation, granular document security (allow some/none/all modification), and can be entirely self contained (supports RLE, LZW and JPEG encoding for embedded graphics), allowing a PDF to look the same anywhere it is viewed and be easily transferrable.

Disclaimer: I distribute everything in PDF. My resume, invoices, proposals and other similar things. The only problem I have is trying to be polite when people ask why I don't use Word.

PS: anyone who feels that PDAs are a limiting factor in the use of PDF - huh? They're grand for PIM/phone/GPS/GameBoy functionality, but who really wants to slog through a tech ref manual (or equiv.) on the thing? I'm honestly curious, not trying to flame.

• WIMP - Windowed Interface with Mouse Pointer

  This "model" has become fairly much dominant, and continues to undergo various forms of "tweaking," lately with everyone going gonzo over Themes.

  Unfortunately, major changes require either nuking the whole thing and starting from scratch, which is a lot of work, or else making systems of more and more byzantine complexity to operate.

  The latter is where adding additional "stuff-to-click" takes us. Every added toolbar results in another "hieroglyphic" language, moving us towards ancient Egyptian rather than anything modern. (The McLuhan "Laws of Media" strike again...)

• MVC - Model/View/Controller

  The more "intelligent" sorts of changes don't necessarily involve increasing the visible complexity, but rather trying to split systems more clearly into this paradigm of designing, somewhat separately, an underlying model, a set of controller functions to control the object, and then some form of "front end," or "view."

  It's hardly new; Smalltalk and NeXTStep promoted the MVC "view of the world" umpteen years ago, and the problem really is that the ad-hoc GUI construction systems have so often conflated M, V, and C together that many GUI applications wind up as jumbled sets of functionality.

  It may be that introducing things like Glade User Interface Builder along with libglade , to encourage keeping "controller" stuff in once place, GNOME-print, Gnome Canvas, DPS for XFree86, and Display Ghostscript, ReportLab, providing "view" tools, and CORBA, providing separation of "model," may provide a direction to clearly separate these functions so that GUIs will be less confused.

None of this represents dramatic, overnight change, and I'm not sure that that's a bad thing.

You may want to have a look at ReportLab. It is a very impressive package written in Python that can be used to generate PDF reports. They have several examples including a medical insurance form. It would probably take some time to set things up, but you could have a totally automated system.

You may want to have a look at ReportLab. It is a very impressive package written in Python that can be used to generate PDF reports. They have several examples including a medical insurance form. It would probably take some time to set things up, but you could have a totally automated system.