[clug] pdflatex regressions? [SEC=PERSONAL]

[Roppola, Antti - BRS]

Unfortunately my personal experience is that anything that is simpler
than .tex is typesetting incomplete. OTOH, if you don't need a full
typesetting environment, near enough is likely to be good enough.

Word processing documents can be vague on structure. SVG will expect you
to handle a bunch of stuff yourself.

I have had some good results with manually coding Postscript and using
external apps to generate nested content and then importing them into
pdflatex. FYI, we ended up using Perl to generate and fill the .tex
templates.

Manually coding up Poscript to do things like sensibly break items
across columns (i.e. so the sub-heading wasn't the last element in a
column with its child entry alone at the top of the next) gave me a new
appreciation of why one should use a library to do this sort of thing.

We tinkered with Cocoon once, but I've not looked at it for years.

Cheers,

Antti

-----Original Message-----
From: linux-bounces at lists.samba.org
[mailto:linux-bounces at lists.samba.org] On Behalf Of David Tulloh
Sent: Tuesday, 13 October 2009 11:49 PM
To: Andrew Janke
Cc: linux at lists.samba.org
Subject: Re: [clug] pdflatex regressions?

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
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