Essays and engineering writing from the making of quario — on reports as data, safe rendering, and documents that hold up.
One definition, 35,000 rows, four targets. Render time, peak memory and output size for a 1,005-page statement, measured on one laptop, with the method to repeat it.
Drawing a report is the easy part. The hard part is deciding what repeats, what totals, and where page two starts. Report writers answered that with bands, and HTML-to-PDF dropped the answer.
A report you can't diff is a report you can't review. Why the layout belongs in a definition you store, version and read like any other file in the repository.