Clean way to convert spreadsheet with many rows into pdf

I'm not looking for a library to convert excel files to pdf, there are plenty of those available. I'm looking for a clean way to convert a spreadsheet with more rows than the width of a page into a pdf.

Can this even be done? I don't consider making the text smaller a valid option because it could feasibly reach an upper limit (i.e. 1 pt font), and there may be enough columns in the spreadsheet to actually reach开发者_开发百科 that limit (~30).

My only idea right now is to make the pages landscape, but is there a way to have the pdf show as "two-up" with both of the pages in landscape and have the proper page ordering underneath to look like a cohesive spreadsheet?

Any other ideas? or suggestions for the idea I have?

Assuming you can read the Excel file (for instance with Apache POI), consider writing to the PDF with Apache FOP using a custom paper size that you define. It may be difficult to print without a roll paper printer, but it will display on the screen just fine.

Have you looked at JasperReports? It has a pretty strong templating engine.

I've never used JasperReports the way you do, but their specialty is dynamic reports so I'd guess they know how to handle page overflows in a nice way.

Here's what I ended up doing. It uses the QuickLook feature on MacOS to make a HTML file, then uses wkhtmltopdf to turn the HTML file into a PDF.

#!/usr/bin/python                                                                                                           
#                                                                                                                           
# convert an excel workbook to a PDF on a Mac                                                                               
#                                                                                                                           
#                                                                                                                           
from subprocess import Popen,call,PIPE
import os, os.path, sys
import xml.dom.minidom
import plistlib

if len(sys.argv)==1:
    print("Usage: %s filename.xls output.pdf" % sys.argv[0])
    exit(1)

if os.path.exists("xdir"):
    raise RuntimeError,"xdir must not exists"
os.mkdir("xdir")
call(['qlmanage','-o','xdir','-p',sys.argv[1]])

# Now we need to find the sheets and sort them.                                                                             
# This is done by reading the property list                                                                                 
qldir = sys.argv[1] + ".qlpreview"
propfile = open("%s/%s/%s" % ('xdir',qldir,'PreviewProperties.plist'))
plist = plistlib.readPlist(propfile)
attachments = plist['Attachments']
sheets = []
for k in attachments.keys():
    if k.endswith(".html"):
        basename = os.path.basename(k)
        fn = attachments[k]['DumpedAttachmentFileName']
        print("Found %s -> %s" % (basename,fn))
        sheets.append((basename,fn))
sheets.sort()

# Use wkhtmltopdf to generate the PDF output                                                                                
os.chdir("%s/%s" % ('xdir',qldir))
cmd = ['wkhtmltopdf'];
for (basename,fn) in  sheets:
    cmd.append(fn)
cmd.append("../../" + sys.argv[2])
try:
    call(cmd)
except OSError:
    print("\n\nERROR: %s is not installed\n\n" % (cmd[0]))
    exit(1)
os.chdir("../..")
call(['/bin/rm','-rf','xdir'])