Fancy documents on the fly?

April 10, 2010 8:31 PM

Business document generation: How can I create a document / template system such that I can keep only the "body" of a document in a client's folder on my computer, and use a command or software package that merges that into my latest template design when I want to send it to them as a PDF?

I'm constantly upgrading the visual look of my business documents, and I'm frustrated at having 50 different versions of my template all over the place.

What's a good way to keep the display portion separate from the content?

Requirements:
-Technology must be free/open source
-I need exact control over margins, fonts, colors, imagery, letter- and line-spacing, the way bullet points look, etc.
-I need support for OpenType fonts

Bonus if:
-The technology results in plain-text document storage or close to it.
-It doesn't involve printing something from my web browser :-)

So far I've been using OpenOffice documents. Not terribly in love with it but it's worked until now.

Thanks!

posted by circular to Technology (3 answers total)

Best answer: LaTeX meets all of your requirements.
posted by thebabelfish at 10:14 PM on April 10, 2010

Best answer: Yeh. Sorry but thebabelfish is right.

Better: LaTeX under Linux.
posted by yoyo_nyc at 11:25 PM on April 10, 2010

Response by poster: Thanks, I checked out the Memoir class manual for LaTeX and I like what I see. Except it makes it sound difficult to use new-ish opentype fonts...looks like XeTeX is a better way to go for that?
posted by circular at 8:23 PM on April 20, 2010