If you use web2py, you can make complex reports that can be viewed in a browser, or downloaded as PDF (taking advantage of web2py HTML helper objects to easily diagram a report). See write_html for ...

Templates are predefined documents (like invoices, tax forms, etc.), or parts of such documents, where each element (text, lines, barcodes, etc.) has a fixed position (x1, y1, x2, y2), style (font, ...