On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 11:34 PM, Aditya Mahajan <adityam@umich.edu> wrote:

> On Thu, 11 Nov 2010, Peter Davis wrote:
>
>  I want to process documents from two separate XML files.  One XML file
>> defines the layout of the page ... placement of text boxes, fonts to use
>> ...
>> even placeholder text.  The other XML contains the actual content that
>> gets
>> placed into that layout.
>>
>
> You can generate the \setup commands (i.e. the preable) from the first XML
> file, and the main body of the document from the second XML file.
>


 Thanks!

The layout XML would actually define a kind of boilerplate page, and then
various contents from the other XML would be inserted.  The final document
might have a thousand pages, all based on the same boilerplate, but with
different contents inserted.  So I'd need a mechanism for storing the
boilerplate so that for each element in the content XML, I could generate a
new page using the boilerplate plus the text from that element.

Is that clear?  It's kind of like mail merge in a word processor.  You might
get a few hundred or thousand copies of a letter, each for a different
recipient.  So in essence, one XML contains the letter, and the other
contains the list of recipients, their addresses, etc.

Thank you.

-pd