Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2008 21:52:30 -0600
Reply-To: Alan Churchill <savian001@GMAIL.COM>
Sender: "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From: Alan Churchill <savian001@GMAIL.COM>
Subject: Re: The Future of RTF for Clinical Reporting
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Minor correction:
“Asian languages (many of them) have more than 256 words.”
A number of Asiatic languages use word based writing hence the need for more
than 256 values. Unicode allows for approximately 65,000 values (2**16)
which is critical for international support.
Alan
Alan Churchill
Savian
www.savian.net <http://www.savian.net/>
From: Alan Churchill [mailto:savian001@gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, October 19, 2008 11:48 AM
To: 'SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU'
Subject: RE: The Future of RTF for Clinical Reporting
Ajay,
Asian languages (many of them) have more than 256 characters. That requires
more than 2**8 power meaning that Unicode is required. Not humor, basic
mathematics.
Alan
Alan Churchill
Savian
www.savian.net <http://www.savian.net/>
From: ajay ohri [mailto:ajayohri@yahoo.com]
Sent: Sunday, October 19, 2008 5:14 AM
To: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU; Alan Churchill
Subject: Re: The Future of RTF for Clinical Reporting
Regarding future of RTF, perhaps the gentleman would like to check for
Google Docs (word equivalent) to seek a more cutting edge solution.
The need for jokes on "Asians want to be included now with a ";)" smiley
baffles me.
Is this funny ?
Leave prediction of the future of domain to the data modeling /economists .
Stick to lightsabre/silver light technologies.
--- On Sun, 10/19/08, Alan Churchill <savian001@GMAIL.COM> wrote:
From: Alan Churchill <savian001@GMAIL.COM>
Subject: Re: The Future of RTF for Clinical Reporting
To: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Date: Sunday, October 19, 2008, 3:04 PM
ASCII? The world is Unicode now. We are beyond 256 bytes of happiness plus
the Asians want to be included in what is happening ;-] Try ASCII on
Kanji...not a pretty sight.
Word macros are fraught with security risks so I
wouldn't advocate those as
a means of inclusion. I pointed out how InfoPath can do this inclusion
dynamically. Heck, Word can as well. No need to run a script or macro: do it
on the fly when the document is opened. That way the results are current to
the data.
Alan
Alan Churchill
Savian
www.savian.net
-----Original Message-----
From: SAS(r) Discussion [mailto:SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
RolandRB
Sent: Sunday, October 19, 2008 3:02 AM
To: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: The Future of RTF for Clinical Reporting
On Oct 19, 8:20 am, savian...@GMAIL.COM (Alan Churchill) wrote:
> Lou,
>
> I was emailing a birdie today on this subject. I am a technician and not
an
> analyst so my take was simply on a programmatic way to address Pharma
needs.
> The birdie explained the problem:
>
> - Pharma folks need to include SAS output in a Word
document
> - Currently, they find it easy to cut and paste RTF into Word or, manually
> enter the results.
This simple statement can be interpreted in different ways. By
including SAS output in a Word document then is this output already in
ascii form and do they need to do this for many output tables? If so
then with a script it is a relatively simple matter to gather the
ascii output together and place a marker each time the layout changes.
This marker can then be identified using a Word macro and the layout
of the page adjusted accordingly. That way a whole mix of ascii output
can easily be incorporated into a Word document with all the
pagination correct.
I was asked to modify a script I wrote to put out this layout
information in a marker that started with the letters ÜÜ and the other
guy had a Word macro that would detect these markers and change page
layout accordingly. I just uploaded
the script. Look for the -o
option.
http://www.datasavantconsulting.com/roland/bigxlis
> Here was my take:
>
> - Use Microsoft InfoPath which lays out a document in a user-friendly way
> (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/infopath/HA101656341033.aspx)
> - Have the SAS output to HTML, PDF, XML, whatever
> - Use tags for inclusion into the InfoPath document.
>
> I am not going into the ugly technical details but suffice it to say that
> creating Pharma documents that are standardized and require minimum
> intervention for results seems very doable to me. SAS 9.2 makes it even
> easier using web services but that will have to wait until 9.2's
release.
>
> To simplify it for the day-to-day, perhaps there needs to be an simple
Word
> add-in that copies a SAS dataset into a Word table? That is a trivial
> exercise.
>
>
Alan
>
> Alan Churchill
> Savianwww.savian.net
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: SAS(r) Discussion [mailto:SA...@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Lou
> Sent: Saturday, October 18, 2008 11:45 PM
> To: SA...@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: Re: The Future of RTF for Clinical Reporting
>
> "RolandRB" <rolandbe...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
>
> news:63e4d7e2-f798-457b-a3db-3692f9b554d2@k13g2000hse.googlegroups.com...
> On Oct 18, 1:52 am, cye...@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
> > Hi All
>
> > About a year ago I asked for your opinion/experience whether Clinical
> > Reporting
> > is moving forward to the RTF, PDF, XML, HTML formats etc.
>
> > see
>
>
linkhttp://groups.google.co.uk/group/comp.soft-sys.sas/browse_thread/thre...
>
> > My experience is that more and more
statisticians and medical writers
> > are aware of the RTF
> > format and begining to ask for it. What are your thoughts and
> > experience on this?
>
> > Regards
> > Chen
>
> You must not go down the RTF route for clinical reporting until there
> is a clear change of policy by the SAS Institute. The last position
> they took on this that I am aware of is stated in clear terms in this
> document.
>
> http://support.sas.com/techsup/technote/ts749.pdf
>
> In that document it makes it clear that RTF output is not supposed to
> be the final output and will need editing. This means that doing bulk
> reporting might never be practicable or advisable using RTF at any
> time in the future.
>
> PRINTER is for presentation-ready printable reports.
> RTF is designed to allow editing, not optimized for final
output
>
> You need to give that PDF that is held on the SAS support site a
> careful read.
>
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!
> !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
> Back before ODS, SAS produced print image files that perhaps weren't
> intended to be editable but nonetheless could be - all you needed was a
text
> editor. Today, for better or worse, the counterpart is something that
> anyone can look at and/or print using Word or some similiar application.
>
> What's needed is something that lets programmers control the vertical
as
> well as the horizontal placement on the page, and is accessible to
> non-programmers, even near computer illiterates, using MS Office or
similar
> software. And this is important - many of those who produce clinical
> output and almost all of those who use it
ARE NOT PROGRAMMERS, and
solutions
> that don't take that into account end up being sub-optimal.
>
> At the moment, because a bunch of people at a big company were out of
touch
> with their customers, we're stuck with half a solution in the form of
ODS
to
> RTF (in spite of aiming at MS RTF which has been out there for a couple of
> decades, they don't appear to even implement the full tagset), one
that
> seems to require almost as many work arounds and tricks to produce the end
> results as were needed before ODS was introduced.
>
> We're stuck with PROC REPORT (though it lacks the flexibility of the
data
> step) and RTF not because they're good solutions, but because the
> alternatives presently on offer are even worse.- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text
-
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