Date:         Fri, 9 Jun 2000 08:20:15 -0500
Reply-To:     John Baj <jbaj@NIU.EDU>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         John Baj <jbaj@NIU.EDU>
Subject:      Re: ODS RTF solution for creating a questionnaire?
Comments: To: Mike Rhoads <RHOADSM1@WESTAT.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

Thanks for the suggestion.

I made a couple of valiant tries at ODS RTF and quickly gave up.  I ended up
going the HTML route although I passed on ODS for the time being.  I simply
created a shell for the questionnaire in Dreamweaver,  Wrote a quick SAS
program to translate each line of HTML into a "put" statement, added the data
step commands and used IF/THEN/ELSE to control branching.

It may have not been the most efficient way to go but it was quick and worked
just fine.

One question.  How did you control paging?  I found a way using a <style> tag
that worked great on IE but kind of iffy on Netscape.

John

Mike Rhoads wrote:

> John,
>
> I had a couple general thoughts on this:
>
> 1)  The RTF driver for ODS is (highly) experimental in version 8.0.  My
> limited experiences with it have not been particularly good.  It is
> scheduled for production status, and should be much improved, in 8.1.
>
> 2)  In the meantime, you might consider using the HTML destination for ODS.
> I have been working on a somewhat similar application with good results.
> You have your choice of fonts and can let the browser wrap your long text
> rather than trying to do it yourself.  HTML tags can be used for line
> breaks, boldface etc.  You can print the document from the browser -- page
> breaks are not "perfect", but were better than I expected.
>
> 3)  There is a DATA step interface to ODS.  However, I had good success
> using PROC REPORT.  The one gotcha I ran into is that currently a single
> LINE statement can put out about 400 characters max.  Data cells don't seem
> to have this limitation.
>
> Good luck!
>
> Mike Rhoads
> Westat
> RhoadsM1@Westat.com