[TriLUG] still in search of a (ed.) scriptable layout expert

[Brent Verner]

[2004-07-09 17:37] Greg Brown said:
| Well, PITA or not, if it will do the job and be able to replicate that 
| job
| by accepting input from a script then I'll consider it.

Greg,

  Go fetch a progarm called idraw (part of ivtools, IIIRC) and
play with it a bit to layout the color blocks and letters on
your page.  Save it, as a .ps file.  The text you put in the
boxes will appear as (A) in the file if you put the letter
A in one of the boxes.  You'll want to replace the A, and any
other text you put in your layout mockup, with something you
can replace with a script later - I used $@varname@$ when I
had to generate PS from a script...
  Then, use the barcode program to generate a table of barcodes
that will fit into the white spaces in your mock layout (you'll
use -e, -t, -g, and multiple -b args, fwiw).
  Put another token in the tokenized template from step 1 
immediately before the showpage command (at the bottom of 
the file), say, $@barcodeoutput@$.
  Now, the output from step 2, you'll need to process a bit.
Basically, you want only the lines between the '%%Page: ...'
and 'showpage' lines.  You'll replace the $@barcodeoutput@$
token with this data.

  Like I was saying, unless you (or someone you know) _knows_
Postscript, you're looking quite a bit of tedious trial && 
error work to get this working.

hth.
  Brent