From: Dom Lachowicz (domlachowicz@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Jul 15 2003 - 10:26:34 EDT
Hi Phil,
--- Phil Thompson <phil@tarponcreek.com> wrote:
>
> I'm working on a project to automate form generation
> for a government agency. We basically have form
> templates which get populated by data from an SQL
> database, then converted to PDF for archival
> purposes. There is a web app which facilitates this
> process, and the user is encouraged to edit the
> generated form before converting to PDF.
Nice.
> Here is a very rough view of how the app works:
>
> 1. Template file selected
> 2. Perl script replaces <placeholders> with data
> 3. Optional: User edits (client-side) then uploads
> file
> 4. Server converts template file to a PDF
>
> A WYSIWYG editor seems a natural part of this
> process--we have evaluated HTML -> PDF solutions and
> they are not pretty.
>
> Now here are couple of things which are very
> appealing about both Abiword and OpenOffice:
>
> a. free!
> b. cross-platform!
> c. XML default file format, makes #2 "easy"
>
> And (finally) here is my problem... I need to do #4
> XML->PDF on the SERVER side. Now I can install
> Abiword on the RedHat servers with an RPM, no
> problem. The problem is using some magic command
> line (or CPAN module) to automate the conversion to
> PDF process. Has anyone done this or do you know of
> an elegant way to handle? I've thought about the
> "set up a printer, print to postscript, then convert
> PS to PDF" option and I really don't see it working
> for this application. The "setup printer" option
> alone is a huge pain in the rear across our 50+ red
> hat servers.
Ok, so AbiWord 1.99.2 might be an *excellent* choice
for you.
Simply put, you can easily print to a file or a
printer from the UNIX AbiWord command line.
AbiWord-2.0 --print="file.ps" file.doc
or
AbiWord-2.0 --print='|lpr -Pwhatever' file.doc
AbiWord-2.0 also supports mail-merging - exactly what
you're looking for with your "template form letters"
feature. You can combine printing + merging. AbiWord
currently supports 3 data sources:
1) CSV file format
2) Tabbed Text file format
3) XML file format
We're working on a better GDA (Gnome Database)
provider too.
AbiWord --print="file.ps" --merge=file.csv file.abw
Will print out file.ps-0, file.ps-1, file.ps-2, ...
You could always then pass the output to 'ps2pdf' to
convert to PDF. It should be entirely scriptable from
the command line.
I coded both of these features. Please feel free to
contact me off-list.
Also, the OO file format isn't XML. It's a collection
of XML documents contained inside of a ZIP archive.
Also, I don't think that OO has a mechanism for
printing from the command line. I don't know how well
its mail-merge features work, either.
Dom
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Tue Jul 15 2003 - 10:39:48 EDT