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
