On Tue, Oct 24, 2006 at 10:09:50AM -0600, Phillip Hellewell wrote: > > It was a openoffice document as a template for the picture book > design. Then it had a macro that when you run would read from a > database, which in this case was simply a csv file created by > exporting names from MLS. (But I think I had to modify the csv file a > little bit to fix a few things to how I wanted them.) > > Anyway, it was pretty sweet and it even grabbed pictures and pasted them > in there. I think the name of the picture had to match the HofH ID. It > was fun to watch it creating all the pages, one by one. Each page fit > four families, so the picturebook size was 4.25 x 5.5. Then we punched > two holes in the top of each booklet and used rings to hold it together. > > I don't know if it is in a working state or not but with a little bit of > love, you could probably make it work again. >
As Jason mentioned, tons of people have come up with various ways to do ward directories. The openoffice idea looks pretty cool, and the screen scraping thing is definitely a good idea, too. I've been using a LaTeX template, which is my favorite way for a few reasons. 1) I like being able to do other stuff with the data, which is easier with the Django/database thing than with something like screen scraping. For example, I did two Django SELECT queries on Sunday (for two unrelated purposes): to find everyone who was baptized in 2005 or 2006, and to find the number of men and women in the ward. 2) I like things to be fully automated. I think it would be really cool to watch the openoffice macros in action (I really do think it's a cool idea), but I can't run a shell script that creates a photo directory and copies it to a web location with password protection, all in a few seconds. 3) I'm a perfectionist, so I like to be able to have full control on what happens in the output. LaTeX has its quirks, but it gives me this. In fact, I'm not so much concerned about leaving something behind when it comes to a ward directory. They're a ton of work to put together no matter how automated you make it. The process of taking pictures takes forever. Because of the overhead each semester/year, I don't feel bad if all I do is leave someone a CD full of photos. However, there are other sorts of documents that get updated more incrementally. I really would feel bad leaving somebody in the situation where they only have to change one entry on the page, but they find themselves having to completely redesign a document. Now, if I could somehow output to your openoffice template in addition to outputting to LaTeX/PDF, then I'd be in business. :) Does anyone have experience writing directly to OpenOffice's XML format? How much of a pain is it? -- Andrew McNabb http://www.mcnabbs.org/andrew/ PGP Fingerprint: 8A17 B57C 6879 1863 DE55 8012 AB4D 6098 8826 6868
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