As well as producing excellent results on paper, NewLeaf is ideal for generating online reports for viewing as PDFs with the Adobe Acrobat viewer. It also supports many of the standard HTML formats, so that simple text reports and tables can be published on the World Wide Web and viewed in any standard browser.

To prepare a report for publication in Adobe’s PDF format, generate it as normal and assign the completed report to a text variable in your workspace:

leaf.Use webpage    © Choose a layout
leaf.Flow mytext
leaf.Include mychart     © graphics from Rain are fine
page„leaf.Close
'c:\acrodist\in\test.ps' PostScrp.WritePDF page

The last line simply writes the entire report to a DOS text file in the Acrobat Distiller’s inbound directory. Assuming Distiller is running, it will pick up the file and compress it from normal PostScript format into Adobe’s PDF (Portable Document Format) which is a very compact representation of the page, but which retains all the detail. A typical NewLeaf report is around 3k bytes per PDF page, including graphics and tables. Acrobat Distiller is a component of Adobe Acrobat Pro.

You can now take the .PDF and copy it to your Web server. Anyone with the Acrobat viewer (available free from Adobe’s web site) will be able to download it very quickly, and zoom in on the detail just as you can with the NewLeaf preview tool.