Document Templating / Report Generation solution?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 06:03:28PM -0500, S P Arif Sahari Wibowo wrote:
> 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.

I think you may unfortunately have to make a choice:
You can have good looking consistent auto generated documents
or you can have something you can edit in a word processor.

Now why you would ever want to even allow someone to edit the report
after it was generated just makes no sense to me.

How would you format the table in plain text?

> 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?

latex is for typesetting.  Not report generating.  Perl is for report
generating, and perl could generate the latex code which you then turn
into HTML or PDF or whatever you need.

Or you can look at a docbook based system, where you have templates for
how to format tings (the style) and you generate the data with a perl
script or similar.  The data is then processed through the templates
and out comes the resulting pdf, html or rtf or whatever you want.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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