With good markup semantics and some conversion tools, you probably could generate PDF, CSV, XLS, and ODS from HTML. Some of the more powerful document transform

With good markup semantics and some conversion tools, you probably could generate PDF, CSV, XLS, and ODS from HTML. Some of the more powerful document transformation engines do feats like this. I don't know, though. I tend to think that this is less a job for the view (and templates) than it is for smart models, or models with some kind of helper that assists them in knowing how to represent themselves in a given format.