[BangPypers] Creating PPT with graphs

[Jins Thomas]

Hi all,

To be frank i have a doubt whether it's a right thing to ask in this forum.

We had a requirement where we need to process some HTML files (which
contains tabular data) and create some graphs and finally create a PPT which
contains the graphs and a pdf which contains its tabular data.

We that time used Perl to achieve this since we already had the expertize
and there were some time constraints. We used GD graph module for creating
graphs as .png files and used OpenOffice::OODoc module to create OpenOffice
impress document with these *.png files. And we also had a xml configuration
file to configure for each type of html files what kind of graphs are
required.

Now the problem is (Not sure it's a problem of Perl, it can also be due to
some poor programming style)

1. Script has become huge (around 2500+ lines, though it has lot of newlines
and comments) when we included many options, flexibilities and exceptions.

2. Still at some point of time we are getting stuck because of the
limitations of the GD graph module or OpenOffice module.

3. Readability is also getting difficult day by day even though I'm the only
who wrote all those things. I myself is struggling a bit to understand why i
did that.


So I would like to have some opinions/suggestions from you like

1. Would these kind of problems happen if i had used Python also

2. How good is the similar modules for creating OpenOffice documents, pdfs ,
graphs as png files in Python

3. Would it be a good idea to rewrite the entire thing in Python.

4. And some general programming thoughts/suggestsion/advice why this
happened :(


Thanks alot
Jins Thomas