[scribus] Printing an SLA without using X11

[Philipp Wagner]

Jon wrote:
>> Is it 
>> so much bother to open Scribus to print a file?
> 
> Yes, because that requires a human being.
> 
> I need to be able to print (or export to PDF or ghostscript) SLAs with
> no human intervention. After creating letter or form templates and
> having our database merge arbitrary account information selected at
> arbitrary times by any of our users for an arbitrary number of
> templates, I need to be able to print them with no human intervention.
> We are already doing this with a deprecated proprietary word processor
> (wordperfect 10) which is the last mission critical application forcing
> us to depend on a proprietary deprecated "operating system".

I'm using XSL-FO together with Apache FOP for that (it can even produce
postscript and PCL output including special commands like choosing a
different printer tray for the first page, which is quite handy for mass
mailings). This way you stay within the area of open formats and if FOP
doesn't support all the features you need (there may be some, depending
on your requirements), you can always switch to a commercial FO processor.
Also, using other existing XML techniques like XSLT makes customizing
documents really easy.

Philipp