Printing Labels / Envelopes and a question about IDL

[Ken]

Here is what I am doing...

I have pulled a bunch of address and customer information from a
database and want to format the output such that it can be printed on
labels and envelopes.

Here is what I was thinking, I would like to leave the formating to
tools better suited to the task than I will ever build, such as
OpenOffice Writer. I am using Linux so Word is not an option but I am
open to other tools and/or ways.

So I have downloaded the OpenOffice developer libraries along with
Java programming examples, but there are no corresponding class/java/
or jar files for the objects being referred to in the source, there
are however corresponding .idl files in the correct folders which do
match. I have no experience with these files. So these files can be
compiled into .class files? Do I understand correctly and these .idl
files are an extra level of abstraction that allows compilation into
different languages to provide a wide range of language bindings?

 

[Ken]

My first idea was to output the data in xml and then use xsl to format
the data, but I don't know any word processors that take xml/xsl and
produce nice output... that solution just seems too easy. So my next
idea was to create an OOo Write document (which is xml, but certainly
not understandable at a glance) formated for my requirements, with
place holder text in all the required locations and then doing a
simple substitution...

My desire is to leave the presentation very open and preferably
WYSIWUG in a Wordprocessor and only worry about the data.

 

[Lew]

My desire is to leave the presentation very open and preferably
WYSIWUG in a Wordprocessor and only worry about the data.

Don't you mean "WYSIWYG"?

 

[Ken]

Don't you mean "WYSIWYG"?

Something like that =)

 

[Ken]

Something like that =)

Ok... I have my solution, OpenOffice is the way I'll go. After a few
examples it seems easy enough.