The Underscore Archives

Hi all,
   Its about that time of year again where once again I take a look  
at our internal processes here at Netsight and think 'We really could  
do with a tool to automate some of the proposals we put together'.   
This has been an annual tradition for me now for about 5 years, and  
normally results in me looking at a myriad of different technologies/ 
format (eg. docbook, latex, xsl:fo, opendoc, reportlab, plain 'ole  
xhtml/css, etc) for producing a nicely outputted and styled pdf to  
send to a client.

This annual event is normally directly following me nearly throwing  
my laptop across the room trying to get MS Word[*] to stop f^&king up  
my formatting and numbering.  Inevitably though something else comes  
up and I never get very far in my dreams, either that or I dream the  
impossible dream and give up.

I am currently looking again at xsl:fo and Apache's FOP to perhaps  
generate content into an XML file then apply xsl:fo and get a PDF out  
of the end.  My main requirements are to be able to create reasonably  
structured documents (eg. sections, subsections) with tables of  
content, text flowing, tables etc.

So, any of you out there know of any new, sparkly, whizz-bang systems  
for doing this that might be for some reason better than the myriad  
of existing stuff out there?

-Matt

[*] yes I could use OpenOffice/Page/etc, but that still isn't really  
what I want, I want some method of (maybe through a website) create a  
document out of a bunch of components and render it.

-- 
Matt Hamilton                                       matth at netsight.co.uk
Netsight Internet Solutions, Ltd.        Business Vision on the Internet
http://www.netsight.co.uk                             +44 (0)117 9090901
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