Re: Possibility of personalizing OpenOffice documents automatically?
On Tue, 31 May 2005 12:10:38 +0200
herve@elma.fr wrote:
> What are you thingking about ? LaTeX or something like that ? Not usefull for
> "common" user to manage the document in my point of view ....
Well, LaTeX has a longer learning curve than does OpenOffice,
especially if you're used to doing word processing rather than text
processing or text editing. But unless your master documents are going
to be overly fancy with respect to fonts (and even that is doable in
LaTeX), tables, and the like, then doing it in LaTeX or some other text
file format is giong to be easier -- simply because it's easier to
manipulate text in plain text format than it is to manipulate it in a
word processor file format.
It's rather simple, for instance, to automate this process with shell[1]
or perl scripts, if you use a text file. In fact, the shell script can
be its own letter, and you just use shell variables for items such as
name, address, city etc. Then, the operator would only need to fill in
a few fields on a web form, and your backend would generate the script
or whatever, and send it to the printer..
[1] Unix Power Tools has a simple example, but I don't have the book
handy right now to cite it. As I recall, it's basically uses back ticks
and here documents the whole thing right to lpr. But you lose fancy
formatting, which might not be what you want -- sales letters usually
are crammed full of that sort of thing.
> Hervé
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