[Scribus] VDP

[Celso Junior]

Wow!

That's the part of my work We're dealing with right now! ^_^

We choose for the VDP workflow, the following tasks

Prepare the layout - Choose a program to create the layout, It could be 
scribus or inkscape, or even openoffice it self

Prepare the fields - Place brackets arround  the  data fields, where 
they are ment to appear, like write [costumer_name] in the top of the 
page per eg.

Prepare the data - It can be trought a sql consult or even xls,ods or 
any data format handled be OpenOffice

Prepare a script that will read each row, and pass to the "sed" command 
to handle  the replacement of the field name for it's content, copying 
the new layout to a temp file

Call the program to export the layout to pdf or ps format (scribus has 
an external python script for it and inkscape has it's own)

Pdftk or Pdflatex to join the files (if required)

This workflow is for simple caracter replacement, without concerning the 
space the character should use. Different from a replacement of a ps or 
pdf content, the source replacement, followed by the export causes the 
VDP becomes really dynamic, wich allow us to play with a lot of 
different features we can achieve, like change the color of the text, 
depending on the costumer's gender, a specific image, depending on some 
particular data, calling image magick to create a special effect arround 
the costumer's name, or even a new complete layout, using layer 
visibility...

Let's play with that ^_^v