Generating Fantastic Reports
We'll see in this chapter how to write automated documents and perform associated operations, such as dealing with templates in different formats. We will cover simple options like plain text and also options that include richer possibilities, such as Markdown. We'll also cover standard formats such as Word and PDF. These two formats are arguably the most common way of sharing documents and reports across the globe.
In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:
- Creating a simple report in plain text
- Using templates for reports
- Formatting text in Markdown
- Writing a basic Word document
- Styling a Word document
- Generating structure in Word documents
- Adding pictures to Word documents
- Writing a simple PDF document
- Structuring a PDF
- Aggregating PDF reports
- Watermarking and encrypting a PDF
We will start our report generation with a minimal text-only one...