Document Templating / Report Generation solution?

[Christopher Browne]

On 2009-02-20, S P Arif Sahari Wibowo <arifsaha-/E1597aS9LQAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> 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?

LaTeX isn't a terribly suitable solution, given your expectation of
generating PDF, HTML, and RTF/Word; it is intended to provide
attractive, typeset-quality output, so that really the only one of
those formats that it would be convenient to generate would be PDF.

As a second factor, LaTeX isn't particularly amenable to the sort of
programming model that you seem to be contemplating.  Now, while it's
"Turing complete," and thus, in *principle*, capable, along with the
hooks people have added to it, over the years, of doing just about
anything, what it *conveniently* supports are not "procedural" sorts
of things (e.g. - opening files, databases, and such), but rather
operations surrounding how to format particular bits of your document.
 If you *did* want to use LaTeX, I'd recommend writing code in some
other language to *generate* LaTeX.

I'd tend to think that a more suitable data format to start from might
be DocBook.  http://www.docbook.org/  This is based on SGML/XML, and
is intended to support remapping documents written in DocBook to
various other formats that tend to include PDF, HTML, RTF, and such.
Again, it's not amenable, by itself, to programming things like mail
merge or database access - you'd presumably want to write code in some
other language that generates DocBook XML/SGML as output.

What language you'd use for your programming would be up to you - one
could use anything that seems "comfortable," whether that be Perl,
Python, Java, or, for that matter, C, Eiffel, or Ada.  Separation of
concerns does seem like a good idea.
-- 
http://linuxfinances.info/info/linuxdistributions.html
--
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