plain text report output

[Andrew Sackville-West]

On Sat, 01 Apr 2006 12:23:30 -0500
TyrusMaynard <mayn at main.nc.us> wrote:

> I am still a newbie trying to grasp the ability of gnucash printing tools.
> I am learning my way through reports and wondering about the limitations for 
> saving *plain text* to file with well ordered rows and columns.
> 
>       Even though the menu items for Edit> Copy|Paste are greyed out  I 
> "discovered" that I can copy and paste from the gnucash application display window.
> 
>    I hoped I could grab the neatly displayed rows and columns of a report for a 
> similarly "neat"  text file.  Not so... the rows are neat, but the position of 
> some fields are skewed according to the amount of characters in previous fields 
> that compose the row. This means that a pasted text file has well aligned data 
> for leftward columns of a "report" and worsening skew for text derived from 
> rightward columns  of a report.  Now a piece of cake in the word processor of 
> your choice becomes tortuous work.   In many web pages, I find that sections of 
> text that display well also maintains good order when copied and pasted into a 
> text file.
>    Can plain text alignment be improved in whatever code or style sheet that is 
> used to generate a report (assuming such a report is HTML)?
>     Presumably, this would involve design for good behavior of copy/paste ...not 
> simply good design for the HTML displayed outcome.
> 
>    Isn't the *text file* an overlooked asset for report output?  wouldn't it be 
> handy to have a plain text output that is well aligned and can be further 
> "beautified" in any word processor?
> 

here's what I do:

export the report (button on toolbar)
save it as myreport
then at command line:

html2txt -nobs myreport | sed 's/,//g;s/   */,/g' > myreport.csv
note that this is three spaces  --------^^^

or put it in a bash script called convert
#!/bin/bash
html2txt -nobs $1 | sed 's/,//g;s/   */,/g' > $1.csv

and just run "convert myreport"

this pulls the commas out of any monetary amounts, then removes any occurence of 2 or more spaces and replaces it with a comma. then it reads into your favorite spreadsheet just fine. 

ymmv.

A


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