On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 2:40 PM, Taco Hoekwater
Wolfgang Schuster wrote:
The discussion
Before I start to give you information about my module and give you the chance to mention your own wishes or thoughts about the inteface I'm interested what do you use currently to write you own correspondence (letter, invoices etc.).
This may be a surprise, but I use only oowriter/oocalc currently. Why?
* I have many different envelopes to cater for, with and without address windows.
This is why I seperate content and layout, the input for the data and text is always the same but layout and fields/information depend on the output.
* I sometimes need DIN letters, but sometimes just an informal note to accompany an item
Nothing can be more formal than a german letter in DIN style, lots of rules with fixed values from the typewriter and many exceptions.
* Quite a bit of correspondence is invoices and quotes, with automatic calculations in them (VAT etc).
I already played with a few basic styles but this should go into a seperate module and should be a MkIV only thing to get correct values in the output, although MkII is possible but I won't trust the results.
Most of this can be done in tex/luatex of course, but it is a lot of effort compared to hitting <enter> a few extra times in oowriter. Now, if there was a great letter module for context .... ;-)
Hans provides a Example interface for his own interface but I never got it working for myself but a simple user interface would be nice. Ideas for the input are welcome, it is completely independant from the backend and I could also offer the original interface from Donal Knuth.
Before I release I first public bety version of the modul I want to hear which interface to set the letter information do you prefer and do you have things do want in the module.
I definately would like an easy way to switch envelope formats, and automatic page 1 of ... would be nice too.
As I told, saw what you want and I could write a letter style. The total number of page can be set with subpagenumber and I tried hard to get it working with MkII and MKIV and spend a few hours to find the last remaining bugs. Wolfgang