In this post, I will talk about customizing report styles in EG 3.0. As you know, EG 3.0 supports all commonly used output formats: HTML, rich text format (RTF), Adobe’s ODF format and everybody’s favorite plain-text output. By the way, EG 4.1 will support more formats including XML.

Let us begin with HTML styles and options. First, to get to the Report Style window, go to the menu and select Tools>Options>HTML. There are only two things you can customize in this case: HTML template and ODS statements.

The first one defines the default HTML template for your output. You can either stick with a very basic template (EGDefault) or choose something more colorful (have you ever tried Watercolor?). Please remember that, if you do not like the template you have specified in this window, you can easily override it without going back to the Options. After you have generated an HTML table or listing, pull down a list of HTML templates on the menu bar and choose what your heart desires. EG will immediately re-format your ourtput. This is the beauty of HTML output.

Now let us turn to the text box in which you can enter ODS statements. What exactly is this? In general, you can control almost every component of an HTML template within EG using the Style Editor (highly recommended). It is user-friendly and flexible. But there are obviously some rarely used template options that the Style Editor does not handle. You can fine-tune your HTML output by specifying certain ODS options directly in this text box. To give an example, by default, EG 3.0 uses the so-called UTF-8 encoding in the HTML output. If you would like to include text in European or other languages in your output, it will be beneficial (or required) to change the encoding system. To do this, uncheck the ‘Encode character set’ box and specify the appropriate encoding standard in the text box, for example, encoding=’iso-8859-1′. Click OK to save the new settings.

To be continued — in the next post I will cover style options for the RTF and PDF formats.

Alex Dmitrienko