From: Caolan McNamara (caolan at domain csn.ul.ie)
Date: Tue 14 Aug 2001 - 12:19:29 IST
On Tue, Aug 14, 2001 at 12:00:51PM +0100, Glen Gray wrote:
>
> The main thing I can't quite see is how to do the embedded code in the
> documents. What I thought of this morning would be to do it using XML.
> AbiWord uses XML as it's default file format. There are also plenty of
> tools for DocBook conversion to postscript etc. What might be best is to
> embed XML tags that refers to function names that the preprocessor picks
> up on, exec's the appropriate function and replaces the tag with the
> resulting XML string. Then when all the XML has been preprocessed pass
> it through db2ps and send it to a printer queue. Hmm, that should
> probably do it.
Its worth pointing out that {Star|Open}Office like MSOffice has a macro
basic based scripting language and mailmerge stuff, pluggable databases
etc. So you should be able to create a similiar system to your original
word based one in writer. With the additional plus that, if needs be,
you can write a seperate program in c++/java that controls a running
copy of OOo to do your work.
So even if the scripting didn't work out you could go ahead with your
preprocessing xml plan, except that you can use the OOo xml format and
tell OOo to print it for you, that way you would have a far richer file
format to use for layout issues, e.g. abiword doesn't do tables.
api, http://api.openoffice.org/
databases, http://dba.openoffice.org/
C.
-- Caolan McNamara | caolan at domain skynet.ie http://www.skynet.ie/~caolan | +353 86 8161184 I will not gloat over my enemies' predicament before killing them
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.6 : Thu 06 Feb 2003 - 13:11:37 GMT