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Re: How can I automate production of many documents with same template but different key/table-value content?
Subject:Re: How can I automate production of many documents with same template but different key/table-value content? From:Robert Lauriston <robert -at- lauriston -dot- com> To:Dan Richards <danrrich -at- gmail -dot- com>, TECHWR-L Writing <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Thu, 24 Apr 2014 09:52:27 -0700
If these values are coming from a database, Google "database
publishing." FrameMaker and InDesign both have third-party tools for
that.
On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 6:29 PM, Dan Richards <danrrich -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:
> Hi, I need to create 1000s of multi-page PDF documents which require the
> typical header/footer/pagination/wrapping of text/etc. and each of which
> (aside from static text) has 0-10 tables (of fixed types--i.e. the column
> headers are pre-specified, but the number of rows/specific content varies
> for each document), as well as ~30 different label-value pairs that need to
> be substituted in predefined locations (some label values are a paragraph
> of text, but others are single words). I need to give the tables a nice
> visual design and have rendering the table automatically handle wrapping
> values in columns automatically.
>
> What tool would you recommend using to create a template to specify the
> layout of these elements to indicate where each label or table should be
> placed? Preferably specify some basic conditional logic control over
> whether to show a section/table based on whether content exists for it for
> that document, to put the logic in one document template rather than have
> multiple document templates for the different possible combinations.
>
> What tool or process would you recommend to substitute in the specific
> label-values and tables values for each document into the template and
> render to PDF?
>
> I've never needed to do something at this scale where I need automation, so
> any advice would be appreciated. I'm not sure if there may be a means to
> script something like Framemaker to automate this (applying appropriate
> template and label-value and table-values content files for each document
> to render to PDF) or is there some modern approach for producing
> high-quality paginated documents from a template but substituting variable
> key-value and table-value content may be better?
>
> D
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