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

[James Devenish]

In message <200303102138.07476.derekfountain at yahoo.co.uk>
on Mon, Mar 10, 2003 at 09:38:07PM +0800, Derek Fountain wrote:
> She currently uses Win2K, with Wordperfect.

So, when you said "slightly off topic",... :)

> I should be able to sway her towards OO if there's a reason to do so.
> UNIX based typesetting tools are probably too much of a jump.

I don't have an OOo experience so I'll tell you about things that don't
involve OOo :)

For free-form documents: XML/XSLT processes have worked for me in the
past, with LaTeX as the typesetter for printed output (but obviously not
for, say, Web output). That means that the templates (stylesheets) where
written in XSLT.

Though for forms, where all filled-in values will occupy a fixed-size
space, PDF (or PS) based templates give quick turnaround between the
time that something is submitted and the time a document gets spat out.
In the last few years I have settled on PDF (whereas previously worked
with PS) and there are various toolkits for working with PDF. So, you
could create templates in $WORDPROCESSOR of choice, save to PDF, and
then programmatically plug the values in to copies of the template. One
integration issue is how you markup the form areas in the wordprocessor
and yet ensure that your scripts will fill in the values correctly.
Some people have used PDF annotations to do this, but let me tell you:
DON'T fill in values using annotations -- that is not the same as
putting the text into the page proper. Also, different people like to
handle checkboxes (and other such things) in different ways.