Document Templating / Report Generation solution?

[S P Arif Sahari Wibowo]

Hi!

I am looking for a solution for document templating / report 
generation. There is a discussion similar to this earlier on the 
thread "Advice for a document management system" 
<http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.user-groups.linux.tolug/42935> 
some time ago, but the requirement I have is a bit different, so 
I start a new thread.

Basically I need several documents whose content mostly derived 
from a single database (do those documents shared a lot of 
content with each other) but which information in each document 
can be different. The layout of the documents varies greatly, 
including how the database information laid out in each 
document. This is basically more like reports from database 
application (such as MS Access), only that the layout setting 
can be quite complex (font sizes, table, floating frame, etc.).

When the information in the database changed, the document must 
be regenerated. The document layouts (templates) are changes all 
the time as well, which mean the documents must also be 
regenerated. Additionally, for each document layout (template), 
more than one documents may be generated for different query.

The resulting documents have to be in PDF, HTML, and editabel MS 
Word (tables etc should be there). Additionally it will be nice 
to have OpenOffice.org file as well. Text files are needed also, 
but I guess it will be trivial.

What I think right now is using OpenOffice.org. Unfortunately 
the report feature in OpenOffice.org Base is very limited (no 
way to have free form report - it has to be in table). Using 
mailmerge can have any form, but no way to make a loop in a 
Writer document. I am thinking to use scripting to manually 
added "loop" feature to a mailmerge document.

Obviously many in this forum familiar with latex. Can latex do 
the job? Specifically, can latex embed feature to do database 
query and report generation, or this have to be done externally 
(an external script that modify latex document)? How good are 
latex exports to MS Word?

Thanks!

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                              (stephan paul) Arif Sahari Wibowo
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