SERIENBRIEF

NAME

serienbrief - Easy creation of form letters written in LaTeX

SYNOPSIS

serienbrief [options] <LaTeX source file> <database file>

DESCRIPTION

serienbrief creates form letters using a LaTeX source file and a database file. For each record in the database file, serienbrief will create one output file.
A temporary source file where all text pieces tagged as form letter fields are replaced with the respective data will be composed and compiled using the given LaTeX command.

THE DATABASE FILE

The database file must contain the respective column's name in the first line and all records to be processed in the following lines, always one line per record. All columns have to be separated by one or more tabs.
All LaTeX commands can be used in the database as they would be used in the original document.

If it is necessary to have empty fields for some records, I recommend to use LaTeX's \relax command (without curly braces) there. Text like "Text text **replaceme** text text" will then become "Text text \relax text text", so that the form letter field will be simply ignored by LaTeX (using \relax{} would add additional whitespace).

OPTIONS

--delimiter, -d string: The delimiter used before and after form letter fields to tag them in the TeX file. Defaults to **. E. g., **name** would be interpreted by serienbrief by default.
Don't use strings that are handeled by LaTeX itself here, such as "_" or "\", as they would be interpreted by LaTeX and probably break your document. LaTeX has to be able to compile the source file as-is, displaying all form letter fields as-is.
--outdir, -o directory: The directory where the created form letters will be stored. Defaults to serienbrief. This directory will be created if necessary.
--latex, -l command: The command to execute when compiling the source files. Defaults to pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode.
--outext, -e extension: The extension of the output files. As by default pdflatex is used to compile the sources, this defaults to pdf.
--pretend, -p: Don't actually create output. Useful to find errors in the database file.
--force: Ignore all errors and warnings and don't ask anything. Using this option will probably not result in what you want and will definitely not solve any problems occuring without it. This is intended to be used just for automation like the use in scripts.
--nocolor: Don't use colored output.
--help, -?: Show a short help message.

TODO

Re-write the whole thing in a reasonable language like Python ;-) Abstract a database backend so that all kind of source can be used, not only a tab-separated text file.

HOMEPAGE

http://nasauber.de/opensource/serienbrief/

AUTHOR

Tobias Leupold <tobias . leupold at web . de>

This document was created by man2html, using the manual pages.
Time: 16:21:55 GMT, June 01, 2010