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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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Go via OpenOffice (Score:2)

by Matts (1087)

If you can convert the template to an OO.o template then it's just an XML file (and a fairly well laid out one too - I wrote an article on XML.com about it ages ago). From there it's cake.
Ignore DSSSL and RTF (Score:2)

by ziggy (25)

I've done a lot of work generating RTF with DSSSL. This is not a path you want to follow. The output is generally good enough for many uses, but does not reach into the more complex formatting you are looking to achieve.
First of all, if you're talking DSSSL, you're talking OpenJade, which is a large package, somewhat difficult to build, and very difficult to troubleshoot unless you have some background in SGML arcana, or wish to acquire it. It's like expending the effort to master Victorian era metall
simpler format ? (Score:1)

by tinman (2063)

Word (recent incarnations of it, at any rate) do HTML fairly well. They certainly have no problem opening HTML documents. Would that fit ? You could do headers, footers, watermarks etc etc with HTML. Heck, just create a blank document, export to HTML, run HTMLTidy on it and you have your own HTML template to fill in with text.
I was also going to suggest PDF, because a few decent toolchains exist for generating fancy PDF; but editing it would pose a few problems (unless everyone has Acrobat installed or som