Document Templating / Report Generation solution?

[S P Arif Sahari Wibowo]

On Mon, 23 Feb 2009, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> 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.

Well, basically I want both. :-)

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

These are not "report" per se, these are documents. I mentioned 
report generation mechanism since I need to have those documents 
produced through similar mechanism. As documents they may get 
edited again by the recipients as needed.

> How would you format the table in plain text?

Most likely the plain text one will be from a separate template 
which accommodate plain text (i.e. no real layout complexity). 
In any case not a significant part of the requirement.

> 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.

How good are latex exports to MS Word or OpenOffice.org?

> 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.

However, creating the template for a specific layout - a complex 
one - can be a huge endeavour.

Thanks!

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