On 7/28/25 01:50, Andrea Venturoli wrote:
Hello.
An user of mine has a need: she must produce gobs of documents which
often comprise the same part of text (usually paragraphs or whole
chapters), but differs in some small details or in header/footer.
That's something I would easily arrange with LaTeX, make and other
"developers'" tools, if I had to do that myself; however I need to give
her some more "user-friendly", non technical-oriented tool.
As the task becomes more technical, you will either have to embrace
technical tools designed to do the job right, or technical features
within other programs that hopefully do adequately too. If you have to
be nontechnical about it then you have to accept avoiding trying to have
the computer make the task faster and more reliable.
Given a choice I'd prefer to keep documents going through a system
like LaTeX too; you could probably help by setting up an initial
template with ideas that could be further edited. A GUI would start to
lead to LyX assuming texstudio and just text editors are being avoided.
Andrea's suggestion of Scribus would likely also work.
I've used LibreOffice (OpenOffice specifically as it had less
problematic bugs at the time but I recommend LibreOffice unless you hit
bugs that are not present in OpenOffice) to create a lot of documents
dynamically. It was basically mailmerge on steroids with sections of
documents autofilled from a database (just used separate spreadsheet as
the database source) and conditionally sections appearing/disappearing
depending on the input. Some of my setup was a bit complicated both to
create and to edit in the future but it was because I didn't want to
create multiple separate files and then try to keep them all receiving
the same relevant future edits as I was trying to reduce errors. End
result was 1 file for envelopes (for printing convenience), 1 contained
customized letters (different destinations, copy count, and grouping),
and inspection checklists + some other content (1 copy per destination)
conditionally based off of each entry in the spreadsheet; one mailmerge
operation per file had each client's documents ready + combined into one
big file for easier printing + delivering copies to non-destination
recipients...it was actually more compilcated but that starts to give an
idea of the flexibility.
LibreOffice should support bringing multiple files together into one
master document in a non-mailmerge way too; useful for tasks like
creating a book where each chapter can be a different file (though
OpenOffice, and I presume LibreOffice, handled such large documents as 1
file just fine).
Bonus: these documents must be versioned; that's something she does
manually now, but if the software would help...
Separate version control systems have their value as does just having
good old-fashion backups. Compressed file formats like office suites can
be tracked with version control systems like git but lose out on storage
space benefits as storing versions after each file is compressed saves
almost no space.
I believe it was the flat XML choices in LibreOffice that stores the
file format uncompressed (normally documents are stored as a renamed ZIP
archive). Using that would let you use git or any zip archiver to store
the files in a raw text form that compresses all copies together
properly. There are archivers that handle file revisions like zpaq
(archivers/zpaqfranz is the only ported copy at the moment) so you can
store and retrieve multiple copies of the same filename and it has
options like deduplication in it too.
LibreOffice also has the option to save a backup automatically (.bak
extension); clutter is annoying but that backup has helped a few people
out of mistakes to where they tolerate it. Additionally, LibreOffice's
"File>Versions..." is probably the feature you want as it lets you save
multiple versions of a file within the same single file and gives the
benefit of zipping them all together for compression savings (still
bigger than other compression formats).
Whatever you decide on, still making separate backups is important.
Something web-based (possibly running on FreeBSD) would probably be
fine, but a desktop application would also do (but then it should be
able to run on Windows).
I thought nextcloud had a way to host office editing in a web browser
but I haven't tried it; I don't put things in a browser if I have a good
nonbrowser for the same task but other choices probably exist too.
Does such tools exist? How would they be called? (I have no idea what
search terms to use).
Any reccomenendations?
I use the FreeBSD ports tree sometimes to look for programs for
Windows too; not all things there work on Windows, but many do and I
trust entries in it more than I trust google results to help me find a
project's real home page.
Some ports are poorly placed in my opinion so you may be looking
across editors, print, textproc, and maybe less expected areas like
sysutils or misc. Browse around and you can decide if abiword or others
better fit than lilypond or find other 'gems' even if its more obscurely
related.
bye & Thanks
av.
