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I made my first Birt report and it looks hideous!

I'm wondering if there are premade themes/templates that I can base reports off of that will do some basic niceties like alternating row colors, attractive background colors, space out the elements, center things, etc?

Or do Birt users just live with ugly reports? Please help, I really like the system otherwise.

Greg
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2 Answers2

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This question is a bit hard to answer...

Well, a programmer does not design things (programmers do ugly reports, websites, etc). Let a webdesigner create a cool template (a html page with css and all color-codes) and take this as base for your report. From my experience it's very easy to create nice BIRT reports with a template. For alternating the rowcolor, see BIRT: Alternating row Color in a table group

I guess this is probably not a very satisfying answer...

EDIT: A time ago I've writtenan example regarding this topic. An example of this procedure (including example template+birt report) can be found here

Community
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Tom Seidel
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  1. You can make the reports as good-looking / bad-looking as you want. For a quick sampling of what is achievable please take a look here: http://goo.gl/ldqGP

  2. You would want to integrate your report with CSS file and tweak the CSS file appropriately to get a good look. You must also pay attention to alignments / padding etc. in the columns.

  3. Once you have configured the above to get a good enough looking report, you may want to create a Template-based upon that, so that the next time you start working on a report, you can just use the template as a starting point and save some time. Here is the link which shows how to create a template project: Birt Exchange - Creating and Publishing Report Templates

mastDrinkNimbuPani
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