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

From: Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com>
To: mailing list for ConTeXt users <ntg-context@ntg.nl>
Subject: Re: Best way to create a large number of documents from database
Date: Thu, 16 Apr 2020 16:38:35 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CALBOmsa8zz=++caJUv+cToXevXbs-g=-b8BJHqF8A1=NseGTXg@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <8584A5AC-467D-46DF-B41F-83FF6BC0DB24@elvenkind.com>

On Thu, 16 Apr 2020 at 11:29, Taco Hoekwater wrote:
> > On 16 Apr 2020, at 11:12, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> >
> > I have been asked to create a few thousand PDF documents from a CSV
> > "database" today
>
> 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.

Just to make it clear: I don't really need to optimize on the CPU end,
as the bottleneck is on the other side of the keyboard, so as long as
the CPU can process 5k pages today, I'm fine with it :) :) :)

> > 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),

I do have one page per document. The more annoying part is having
strange document names that need more attention when mapping page
number -> name (I'm not saying this is not doable).

> 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?"

Thanks a lot for the pointer. I didn't have that much time to read
through all the emails recently, I only noticed that he was super
actively working on some metapost stuff, I wasn't paying attention to
this.

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

Let me see what I come up with, I'm stil fiddling with data & layout
at the moment :)

Mojca
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