plain text report output

[TyrusMaynard]

I am asking the gnucash list for any expertise on html2text, such as suggestions 
offered by Andrew earlier on this thread. Andrew suggested to first export the 
report (generates html file) and then deploy html2text ; the sed pipe in the 
earlier posted example doesn't relate to the problem shown in the examples below.
   I think/hope that this tool can become the "work around"  for well aligned 
text output from html reports, but  I havent been able to get around the unusual 
   fragmentation of  some fields into a multi row .

  It seems to me that html2text  has  some set definition of column width 
whenever it parses html which contains table tags  although I can't find that 
thru info or man documents. It also seems that the forward slash in any date 
field is somehow is interpreted as a line feed within any given row/column tag 
location. Below are the samples with example html source.
Thanks Ty


Here are the fields of the report (Num is empty of data):

Date	Num	Description	Transfer from/to	Amount

Here is a sample section acquired by copy/paste to text:
  Good single line rows , its OK except for the  skew of column which are all
well aligned in the HTML display in gnucash and other browsers.

04/05/2005		BRIGGS CONSTR. hydraul oil	Assets.chk153	$23.28		04/07/2005	
ASHEVILLE HOSE & E	Assets.chk153	$29.40			
04/22/2005		SmokyMtn Petro hydraul	Assets.chk153	$33.66			

Here is same sample of HTML sent thru html2 text:
    "html2text -o output.file -nobs input.file"
    The date and description field has become multi-row for ??? reason

04/             BRIGGS CONSTR.
05/             hydraul oil           Assets.chk153          $23.28
2005
04/
07/             ASHEVILLE HOSE & E    Assets.chk153          $29.40
2005
04/             SmokyMtn Petro
22/             hydraul               Assets.chk153          $33.66
2005

Here is the  sample (first row) of HTML source:

<TR>
<TD BGCOLOR="#ffffff">
04/05/2005
</TD>
<TD BGCOLOR="#ffffff">
<BR>
</TD>
<TD BGCOLOR="#ffffff">
BRIGGS CONSTR. hydraul oil
</TD>
<TD BGCOLOR="#ffffff">
Assets.chk153

</TD>
<TD BGCOLOR="#ffffff" NOWRAP ALIGN="right">
$23.28
</TD>
</TR>