[clug] pdflatex regressions?

[David Tulloh]

Andrew Janke wrote:
>> Bite the bullet and port it to some typesetting or template system you do
>> understand?  I confess that, unhelpful as it is to say, I used ConTeXt because
>> of this sort of problem with LaTeX.
>>     
>
> And on this note, I'd be interested to know what others use (beyond
> ConTeXt!) for this.  Myself I tend to use inkscape and sed for complex
> graphics heavy stuff.
>   
I've generated Open Office, often to convert into MS Word.  I have used 
straight template substitution driven by Make and full generation using 
the Perl CPAN libraries.  This is very useful for test reports from 
automated testing (with a small amount of hand editing at the end) and 
large documents (hundreds of pages) generated from test databases with 
multiple graphs etc.

For precise layout work I have also generated pure postscript in the 
past, I've written bash scripts to generate CD covers and CD wallet 
faces.  For simple drawing of lines and text postscript is really very 
simple, you can even push some of your calculations into the postscript 
engine.  SVG may be more suitable these days but I haven't investigated 
it myself.


David