plain text report using Firefox/OpenOffice

[TyrusMaynard]

I haven't been able to identify the odd outcome of text output from html2text on 
this Ubuntu system and am unable to achieve what Andrew describes.
But ..... I discovered an unusual feature of the combo of Firefox displaying the 
  html of a gnucash report and copy/paste insertion into an OpenOffice document.
   It seems that OpenOffice 1.1.3 recognizes what it receives from the copy 
paste to compose a multicolumn text report based on the definition of table tags 
in the original HTML.  This includes the bonus that you can resize the columns 
to overcome occurrences of any long text data that is forced to wrap within the 
predefined columns. This is definitely not what you will get if you paste into a 
plain text editor.
    This behavior of OO 1.1.3 figures out the column size for each column tag 
within rows and it has something to do with what Firefox is putting into the 
copy/paste buffer.  This does NOT occur with a copy/paste from the same HTML 
report displayed in Opera, or with gnucash as the browser.
   Does this have to do with some assumptions that Firefox makes about tabs?
   Do others notice that this behavior is only achieved by the combo of Firefox 
with Open Office?
   This will be my work around tool for getting text that I can resize in a 
wordprocessor. It allowed me to reduce a 20+ page report  to 12 pages.
It also eliminates the bug which "mows" down starting/ending lines in the 
postscript output for printing in my version of gnome.

I was on the yellow brick road and fell through the clouds to be deposited in 
Kansas. I guess tornado metaphors are not so good given the recent real 
destruction, but stumbling onto this solution seems as random as being thrown 
about by a tornado and coming out lucky.

Thanks for the help when I was twisting around, Ty


>>>example below here>>>
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>