On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 11:34 PM, Aditya Mahajan <adityam@umich.edu> wrote:

On Thu, 11 Nov 2010, Peter Davis wrote:

I want to process documents from two separate XML files. One XML file
defines the layout of the page ... placement of text boxes, fonts to use ...
even placeholder text. The other XML contains the actual content that gets
placed into that layout.

You can generate the \setup commands (i.e. the preable) from the first XML file, and the main body of the document from the second XML file.

Thanks!

The layout XML would actually define a kind of boilerplate page, and then various contents from the other XML would be inserted. The final document might have a thousand pages, all based on the same boilerplate, but with different contents inserted. So I'd need a mechanism for storing the boilerplate so that for each element in the content XML, I could generate a new page using the boilerplate plus the text from that element.

Is that clear? It's kind of like mail merge in a word processor. You might get a few hundred or thousand copies of a letter, each for a different recipient. So in essence, one XML contains the letter, and the other contains the list of recipients, their addresses, etc.

Thank you.

-pd