fill out bulletins

[Mats Wichmann]

On 6/13/22 11:11, Michael F. Stemper wrote:
> On 13/06/2022 08.49, jak wrote:
>> Hello everyone,
>> I would like to write a tool to compile post office bulletins because
>> here, unfortunately, they are still the most convenient way to interface
>> the public administration. I don't want to create a UI to edit the
>> bulletin, I will take the data from some file or database but I'd like
>> to print or save the bulletin to the file with all the fields filled in.
>> To accomplish this, I thought about creating a basic graphic (jpg?) file
>> with the bulletin image,
> 
> Please don't create an image. Create something that preserves
> text as text, so that your recipients can (if they so desire)
> search on that text, or copy/paste from your bulletin.

Absolutely agree. We're having a flood of people post code on Twitter
and LinkedIn, which don't support code markup/markdown, so they post
images.  There are several tools that make really pretty pictures... and
they're completely useless as you can't pick the code out of them. Hate
this.

> Somebody suggested TeX/LaTeX. Excellent idea.
> 

Don't know what a "post office bulletin" is, but this sounds like a
template problem ("all the fields filled in"). There are a lot of
templating engines in the Python world from string handling in the
standard library
(https://docs.python.org/3/library/string.html#template-strings) to
tools like JInja and Cheetah and a host of others.  I think there are
many of these listed on the wiki - maybe something here would suit your
needs?

https://wiki.python.org/moin/Templating