Requirements for Reporting Module

Most reports in the application will be generated on the fly as HTML pages. There are obviously no added requirements for these. But some reports can also be exported as LaTeX files and made available to the user for download. To make use of these will require some extra infrastructure, which I will describe here.

On the server side

No extra module will be required on the server side for the application to be able to create the LaTeX report files, but the Administrator will need to make sure at installation time that the reports/ subdirectory (whose name is specified in the Global Definitions File), is made writeable to the Apache web server (i.e. to user 'wwwrun' and/or group 'www').

A dedicated section in the Hirtius-specific Apache configuration file or a .htaccess file located in that directory can be used to further control access to the generated files.

This is detailed in the INSTALL document, provided in the root folder of the distribution archive.

On the client side

Once the relevant LaTeX file has been created by the server and made available to the user, he or she should download it and save it locally on his/her client machine for further processing. Indeed, the raw LaTeX is just plain text laced with formatting directives.

Depending on the workflow you're following, there are two different post-processing routes that you might want to take, each with a different set of requirements. Both are described below the summary.

Executive summary

List of the required packages for the impatient:

texlive
texlive-collection-langgreek
psutils
ghostscript
make
kile (if further editing the reports is required)

Convert to PDF

For reports such as lists, you may simply want to convert your LaTeX file into a PS or PDF document for immediate use (online consultation or printing, for instance).

In order to do this, you will need the following packages installed and configured on your client machine:

the first step is to transform the LaTeX source file (the .tex produced by the Hirtius server) into a "device independant" file (.dvi file). This is done using the LaTeX "compiler", latex. To get it, install the texlive package.
if you want to somehow reorganise the layout of the pages in the document (without changing their content), for instance to print your PS or PDF file in a way suitable to be bound as booklet (see below), you will need some of the tools provided by the psutils package.
if you want to end up with a PDF file, you will need the ps2pdf command, provided by the ghostscript package.
the entire toolchain used to go from the .tex source to the resulting PDF has been automated by a Makefile provided in the scripts/ subdirectory of the distribution archive. Its usage is documented on the Helper Scripts page. Obviously, in order to use it, you will need the make package.

N.B.: the package names listed above are those used on openSUSE. Please adapt to your distribution naming convention.

Turn your PDF into a booklet

Instead of getting a regular PDF file, suitable for viewing on screen (or printing), you may wish to have it formatted in a special way that would allow you to subsequently bind the printed output in an A5 booklet (which makes carrying it around a lot easier). I typically use this format for the Slides list, but the same process can be applied to all Latex reports. Here is how you do this:

in Hirtius, go to the Slides Report Page, select the order in which Slides should be listed (typically, by location) and select the LaTeX output format
download the generated report and save it into a local working directory. Also copy there the Makefile provided in the ./scripts directory of the Hirtius archive (your friendly admin may also have stored it in the ./reports folder on the server, in which case you can download both files from the same place).
in the working directory, type:
```
$ make <report_name>_booklet.pdf
```
(more about this on the Helper Scripts page).
preview and print through Okular/kPDF/Acrobat Reader (leave in portrait, set duplex to "short edge binding")
fold each page in two (to A5 format) and stack the lot
stapple or glue the stack along the folded edge
add front and back covers using strong bristol for enhanced durability

Further edit / rework

If, on the other hand, you want to use the Hirtius-generated report as basis for your published work (as may be the case for the project report -- see Projects Report Page and Projects Management Workflow), you will most likely want to import the raw LaTeX in a LaTeX-aware editor, and either further edit it, or simply reuse parts of it through a copy-paste mechanism.

In this scenario, I recommend to use the excellent Kile (also provided as an openSUSE package called kile).

Of course, there are many more LaTeX editors out there. You will find a nice list here.

Typesetting non-latin characters

One of the non-trivial issues with LaTeX is the typesetting of non-latin characters. The way the standard report headers have been set up in Project Hirtius, any UTF-8 character that you are able to type in the browser (albeit with the help of a character selection applet like KCharSelect) should be rendered by LaTeX, provided it has a font that contains it (this may require the installation of extra packages on your client, for instance the texlive-collection-langgreek meta-package for Greek on openSUSE). I've tested this successfully through the transcription of ancient Greek epigraphy.

This being said, the situation may be more complex than that, for instance if you wanted to typeset polytonic Greek. There are of course different ways of doing this with LaTeX (see this page for more details). But being able to generate the required LaTeX code from the HTML contents of Project Hirtius is another matter. This is not supported yet.

But once again, please keep in mind that the Project Hirtius LaTeX output is only a starting point that you can rework locally on the client (see above).