[Gnumed-devel] Proposed forms system

[Ian Haywood]

Please have a look in gnumed/test-area/ian

This is a putative forms/letters system for gnumed, based on LaTeX

The file a4form.cls is a LaTeX class file. Put it in the TeX search
path (on Debian /usr/local/share/texmf/tex/latex/a4form/) then run
"texhash" as root to make sure TeX can find it. 

The module accepts a LaTeX file and a dictionary.
The dictionary is translated to set of TeX macros,
which can be used in the document. The document can be any LaTeX 
document, however a special class (a4form) is defined to print
text at specific positions.

Advantages:
        - one-stop-shop: scripts, forms, letters can all be expressed as 
templates.
        - high quality output
        - totally free (including the fonts)
        - can run without a GUI, such as on a server
        - cross-platform, including Windows

Disadvantages
        - old-fashioned (TeX dates back to mid-1980s)
        - big dependency (about the same size as wxWindows DLL)

Ian

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