Re: [groff] troff Address book

[Robert Thorsby]

On 27/03/19 21:12:27, Pierre-Jean Fichet wrote:
> I'm looking for an address book compatible with troff. What I'd like  
> is to automatically fill fields in a troff source. A bit more complex  
> task  would be to create several source files from a list of contacts  
> (to build  a bench of letters, for instance).
>
> Does anyone know if such a tool exist yet ?

Good morning Pierre-Jean,

I suspect you might be approaching this problem from the wrong  
perspective. :-)  You seem to be looking for [tg]roff to do all the  
heavy lifting by extracting data from other sources (databases, etc)  
and then using it to produce a document.

Why not simply use groff as *one* of the tools to do the job? In your  
favourite programming/scripting language extract the data from the  
various sources and dump those extracts into a template that contains  
all the groff information.

If you put the extracted data in the font of your groff input file --  
as internal macros [.de], defined strings [.ds], and number registers  
[.nr] -- you can separate the variables from the body of the letter.

You can also use conditionals [.if, .ie] to manipulate the body text  
depending on the nature of the extracted data.

Using a programming/scripting language to create a groff file is  
straightforward, especially if you convert all the data extracted from  
other sources into groff definitions.

Back in January in a thread "[groff] Fonts, PDF images, groff vs.  
heirloom troff" I posted an invoice that had been generated by a shell  
script that gathered information from two databases and three external  
files, converted that information into "definitions" in a groff input  
file and then added the body text.  The shell script then ran the input  
file through groff and ps2pdf to produce the PDF file I posted.

Isn't that what you wanted to do?

Cheers,
Robert