[plug] Building a GUI app to generate a wordprocessed letter

[Russell Steicke]

On Mon, Mar 10, 2003 at 09:38:07PM +0800, Derek Fountain wrote:
...
> The problem here is that LyX and LaTeX aren't really user facing things when 
> it comes to simple letters and the like. The user here is my girlfriend who 
> runs fitness classes. She just wants to be able to fill in a form when 
> someone answers an advert, and have a standard letter pop out which she can 
> post to them. It's currently a manual process involving lots of bits of 
> paper.

That's what I meant about the document/template ratio.  If it's high,
the "pain" [1] of making the template will be minor, and you'll get a
lot of return for it.  If it's low, and you are making lots of different
templates, you may want a word processor instead of a typesetter.  But
if it's too low, they're not really templates.

There are probably lots of ways to do this.  Use whatever works.  [2]



[1] The pain is subjective; I really like LyX.  WYSIWYM makes a lot more
sense to me than WYSIWYG.

[2] Gratuitous footnote.  They seem to be very popular on this list.  :)



-- 
Russell Steicke

-- Fortune says:
I knew I'd hate COBOL the moment I saw they'd used "perform" instead of
"do".
             -- Larry Wall on a not-so-popular programming language