Re: Possibly OT: document composition software

On 7/28/25 01:50, Andrea Venturoli wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> An user of mine has a need: she must produce gobs of documents which 
> often comprise the same part of text (usually paragraphs or whole 
> chapters), but differs in some small details or in header/footer.
> 
> That's something I would easily arrange with LaTeX, make and other 
> "developers'" tools, if I had to do that myself; however I need to give 
> her some more "user-friendly", non technical-oriented tool.

   As the task becomes more technical, you will either have to embrace 
technical tools designed to do the job right, or technical features 
within other programs that hopefully do adequately too. If you have to 
be nontechnical about it then you have to accept avoiding trying to have 
the computer make the task faster and more reliable.
   Given a choice I'd prefer to keep documents going through a system 
like LaTeX too; you could probably help by setting up an initial 
template with ideas that could be further edited. A GUI would start to 
lead to LyX assuming texstudio and just text editors are being avoided.
   Andrea's suggestion of Scribus would likely also work.

   I've used LibreOffice (OpenOffice specifically as it had less 
problematic bugs at the time but I recommend LibreOffice unless you hit 
bugs that are not present in OpenOffice) to create a lot of documents 
dynamically. It was basically mailmerge on steroids with sections of 
documents autofilled from a database (just used separate spreadsheet as 
the database source) and conditionally sections appearing/disappearing 
depending on the input. Some of my setup was a bit complicated both to 
create and to edit in the future but it was because I didn't want to 
create multiple separate files and then try to keep them all receiving 
the same relevant future edits as I was trying to reduce errors. End 
result was 1 file for envelopes (for printing convenience), 1 contained 
customized letters (different destinations, copy count, and grouping), 
and inspection checklists + some other content (1 copy per destination) 
conditionally based off of each entry in the spreadsheet; one mailmerge 
operation per file had each client's documents ready + combined into one 
big file for easier printing + delivering copies to non-destination 
recipients...it was actually more compilcated but that starts to give an 
idea of the flexibility.
   LibreOffice should support bringing multiple files together into one 
master document in a non-mailmerge way too; useful for tasks like 
creating a book where each chapter can be a different file (though 
OpenOffice, and I presume LibreOffice, handled such large documents as 1 
file just fine).

> Bonus: these documents must be versioned; that's something she does 
> manually now, but if the software would help...

   Separate version control systems have their value as does just having 
good old-fashion backups. Compressed file formats like office suites can 
be tracked with version control systems like git but lose out on storage 
space benefits as storing versions after each file is compressed saves 
almost no space.
   I believe it was the flat XML choices in LibreOffice that stores the 
file format uncompressed (normally documents are stored as a renamed ZIP 
archive). Using that would let you use git or any zip archiver to store 
the files in a raw text form that compresses all copies together 
properly. There are archivers that handle file revisions like zpaq 
(archivers/zpaqfranz is the only ported copy at the moment) so you can 
store and retrieve multiple copies of the same filename and it has 
options like deduplication in it too.
   LibreOffice also has the option to save a backup automatically (.bak 
extension); clutter is annoying but that backup has helped a few people 
out of mistakes to where they tolerate it. Additionally, LibreOffice's 
"File>Versions..." is probably the feature you want as it lets you save 
multiple versions of a file within the same single file and gives the 
benefit of zipping them all together for compression savings (still 
bigger than other compression formats).
   Whatever you decide on, still making separate backups is important.

> Something web-based (possibly running on FreeBSD) would probably be 
> fine, but a desktop application would also do (but then it should be 
> able to run on Windows).

I thought nextcloud had a way to host office editing in a web browser 
but I haven't tried it; I don't put things in a browser if I have a good 
nonbrowser for the same task but other choices probably exist too.

> Does such tools exist? How would they be called? (I have no idea what 
> search terms to use).
> Any reccomenendations?

   I use the FreeBSD ports tree sometimes to look for programs for 
Windows too; not all things there work on Windows, but many do and I 
trust entries in it more than I trust google results to help me find a 
project's real home page.
   Some ports are poorly placed in my opinion so you may be looking 
across editors, print, textproc, and maybe less expected areas like 
sysutils or misc. Browse around and you can decide if abiword or others 
better fit than lilypond or find other 'gems' even if its more obscurely 
related.

>   bye & Thanks
>      av.
>