From: Shashank Date <sdate@...>
Date: 2002-12-28T08:32:16+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby & Preprinted forms - will they work together?


"Dave Thomas" <dave@thomases.com> wrote in message
> This might not appeal unless you have some TeX experience, but I've had
> a lot of luck generating fairly complex financial forms (multi-page
> invoices, statements, and so on) using Ruby.

Is this code available anywhere for public consumption ?

> The approach I take is to have the Ruby code generate all the values,
> and then call a templating
> library (actually the one I wrote for RDoc) to substitute those values
> into a LaTeX document. I then format this, and present the results to
> the end user as PDFs.

Is conversion from LaTeX to PDF fairly easy and multi-platform ?

> I write a fairly simple style sheet for each document type, and the
> templates invoke macros in these style sheets.
> Using LaTeX (TeX) gives me precise control over positioning of the
> fields on the paper.

Awesome !