[SOLVED] LazReport vs. Fortes Report CE

[1HuntnMan]

Both of these 2 components come installed with Lazarus.  I'm starting to create some reports for the app I've developed.  Are there any opinions from anyone that have experience using one or the other or both?
Thanks ...

[paweld]

I used FortesReport version 3.24 in several applications (it was a long time ago :-) ), I even moved one of them to version 4ce, but the printouts were coming out with a long delay compared to the older version. Then I gave up fortes reports in favor of LazReport and it was a very good step.
On the plus side, LazReport has very good community support, an extensive report editor (ability to define additional scripts for a memo fields and bands, e.g. with conditional statements), many formats to which reports can be exported.
The only plus fortes report that comes to mind is good support for dot matrix printers (at least in version 3.24). Community support for fortes report can be obtained mainly on their Brazilian forum (in Portuguese)

[mtrsoft]

I've used both and decided to use Fortes4Lazarus.

1. I wanted a report with two columns. This was not easily done in LazReport. In Fortes I used a two column grid as a work around. In both cases it was not possible to get "newspaper style" columns.

2. Fortes seemed to give me better control over the placement of the report elements, but this may just to me.

3. Fortes has a bug / memory leak in its use of bitmaps. This is fixed in the attached files.

4. Fortesd' documentation is sparse and in Porltuguese which makes the learning curve rather steep.

To see an example of what can be done check out the (free, but commercial) evaluation edition of SiP (a Simple Inventory Program)
You can download it from www.fitall.com using the menu selections "Downloads > SiP" and then click on the appropriate link.
(Note: the evaluation edition does not allow saving or printing of the reports, which are generated as pdf files.)

Edit: added attachment.

Edit 2: In the attached files search for JR to find my changes.

[paweld]

@mtrsoft: Re 1. Very simple: in editor: File > Page options > Options tab > Columns

[mtrsoft]

@paweld,

I wasn't clear in my description. I required multiple columns for part of a page, not the whole page.

Thanks for making me clarify things.

[korba812]

I required multiple columns for part of a page, not the whole page.

You can use a subreport with columns as part of the report.

[1HuntnMan]

Thanks all for the input.  Basically I think I'm going to experiment with both creating the same report just to get the feel of which one I will use for the rest of the reports for this project.