[Klug-general] Document Production

[David Halliday]

There is a HTML 2 LATEX application out there.

You can build latex in any language, its markup like HTML but unless you
want it to look like a Donald Knuth book you have to work with the styles. I
have worked with outputting to latex (or .tex) and then to print format.
Most printers happily accept postscript which latex also does.

If I were you I'd experiment with a few mark up languages, starting with the
one you are most familiar with mocking up a template filled with good old
lorem ipsum as a filler where you want your text/data and see how printing
that goes. I know HTML prints fine with good style sheets from within
chrome/firefox so I assume that something could print it happily from the
command line.

I have just seen PPML: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PPML
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PPML>from google but can't see any OSS
software for it.

It might also be worth looking into mail merge type applications.

On 14 February 2011 18:38, Peter Childs <pchilds at bcs.org> wrote:

>
>
> On 14 February 2011 16:26, David Halliday <david.halliday at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> What is your document produced from?
>> Do you need to output to PDF/print specifically?
>>
>
> Yes Print, Its not really web based, but PDF is the format cups works in.
> Its template based (in this case Invoices) basically I need to put loads of
> "data" on to "forms"
>
>
>>
>> Presumably an automatically produced document will contain:
>> logo,
>> boilerplate text,
>> Perhaps a custom paragraph (or mixture of them),
>> Table of data (perhaps from a database or other location)
>>
>>
> Yep that's it, nothing unusual there.
>
>
>> If this is the case then any (scripting) language you like can take the
>> input and mix it with logo/boilerplate text and template file and spit the
>> output to a file (in any mark-up you like). Then you just need to render
>> that mark-up and print it.
>>
>> If you particularly want to print something that looks like a latex
>> document then you can use latex, otherwise you might be better off producing
>> HTML or any other mark-up language you are familiar with.
>>
>
>
> This issue is html does not work well on paper..... as you suggest latex
> works well for latex like docs and not much else, I'm wondering if I can do
> the job with something like iText.....
>
> Would use ODF if ODF came with a light weight method to print it (other
> than loading the whole bloat of OpenOffice)
>
> Peter.
>
>
>
>> On 14 February 2011 16:15, Peter Childs <pchilds at bcs.org> wrote:
>>
>>> I'm looking for a method of automatically producing documents.
>>>
>>> Latex looks like the ideal option, but I really would like a good GUI and
>>> I'm afraid most of the GUI don't produce Tex but produce there own format
>>> that then gets converted to Tex. And I want more control over actual output
>>> than Latex really provides. (Unless there is some way of providing a style
>>> sheet to Latex to get it right)
>>>
>>> I could do the job in odf but OpenOffice is too bloated to print the
>>> documents in bulk, If there was  a odf2pdf cups filter so cups can just
>>> print odf (Says he having checked cups already)....
>>>
>>> Or I need something else,
>>>
>>> Any ideas?
>>>
>>> Peter.
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Kent mailing list
>>> Kent at mailman.lug.org.uk
>>> https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/kent
>>>
>>
>>
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>
>
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