Re: Best way to create a large number of documents from database

[Taco Hoekwater <taco@elvenkind.com>]

> On 16 Apr 2020, at 11:12, Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I have been asked to create a few thousand PDF documents from a CSV
> "database" today (which I can easily transform into any other form,
> like XML or a lua table or TeX definitions or whatever).
> 
> Generating a few thousand pages would be straightforward, but I'm sure
> there are some clever ways to handle this scenario as well, I'm just
> not aware of them :)

In CPU cycles, the fastest way is to do a single context —once
run generating all the pages as a single document, then using
mutool merge to split it into separate documents using a (shell)
loop.

Starting up mutool is much faster than starting context, even with lmtx.


> One option is that I quickly draft a python script that creates a few
> thousand TeX documents and compiles them individually, but it might be
> easier if there was a way to just create a single template document
> and then run something like
>    context --some-params --N=42 --output=document-0042.pdf template.tex
> or something along those lines.

If you want to go this route (and you may have to if not each record
fits exactly within a single page), browse back a day or so in the mailing
list archive for Gerben’s question about 

  “Using command line values in a TeX document; writing a script?"

The replies offer various options using either lua or tex code
to get at user-supplied arguments from the commandline.

Best wishes,
Taco



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