Advice for a document management system

[Zbigniew Koziol]

Once i had a somewhat similar problem. I used LaTeX. However, with LaTeX 
things are not quite trivial always. While my solution worked, I think a 
better one exists around, which I somewhat explored but not implemented.

The latest versions of OpenOffice (guess versions later than 2.3) allow 
to run a lot of ooffice commands from terminal window. And even more: it 
is possible to run ooffice as a service (server). And ooffice handles 
document conversion quite nicely (of course, depending on complexity of 
document and the format of the original one).

Hope this helps.

zb.



Aaron Vegh wrote:
> Good day!
> I'm a web developer. One of my former clients called me this morning 
> asking about a problem they would like solved, that I feel is a tad 
> over my head. I'm hoping that the combined wisdom of this list can 
> help solve it!
>
> The client currently has a system whereby one group produces original 
> documents using MS Word. Those documents are then fed to a variety of 
> sources, ultimately becoming PDFs and Web pages. They currently use a 
> product called Transit which handles the conversion. However, there's 
> a great deal of signal loss during the translation -- these are fairly 
> complicated documents, with each page containing both English and 
> French versions of the text. Ultimately, the people responsible for 
> posting these documents in their respective formats, especially the 
> web version, have to do a lot of post-processing. And the final 
> published results contain errors.
>
> My advice to the client was that, if they moved away from Word, they 
> would be taking a great deal of uncertainty out of the equation. I 
> mentioned either LaTeX or some other kind of customized XML-based 
> solution as a way to circumvent these format transition issues. The 
> goal being to work with plain text rather than an opaque file format.
>
> The situation is complicated by the fact that we've got a current 
> workflow that is run by many people, any of whom may not be 
> comfortable with a change in technology. However, it appears the 
> organization is more willing to run that gauntlet than they have in 
> the past.
>
> My vision looks like this:
>
> 1. Content authors produce LaTeX using some undisclosed tool on 
> Windows. These folks would need to be trained to work against a template.
> 2. A transformation turns that latex doc into a PDF and a 
> nicely-formatted HTML/CSS document.
> 3. Profit!!!
>
> This strikes me as a non-trivial project. I've worked with LaTeX a 
> little bit, but not enough to handle this project. I think this client 
> needs someone for whom LaTeX is their bitch, to put it bluntly. That 
> person would create the templates and recommend the tools to be used. 
> I'm not this person. :-)
>
> Anyone who feels they could accomplish this, I'd love to hear from. 
> I've asked the client if they would like to meet such a person, and he 
> enthusiastically agreed. This could turn into a nice consulting gig, 
> who knows?
>
> Any suggestions or alternative approaches are welcome.
>
> Cheers!
> Aaron.
> -- 
> The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
> TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
> How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists
>

--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists