[texhax] Some questions about integrating TeX in workflow

[Peter Davis]

I'm sorry for cross-posting, but I'm not sure which of these lists is 
more appropropriate.  I've asked some related questions last week, and 
based on the responses and my own tests, it looks like I will be able to 
use TeX for what I have in mind.  I'm very grateful for all the feedback 
and suggestions I've gotten.  Thank you!

Basically, we have a workflow that collects information from a database 
and produces reports.  I'd like to improve the typographic quality of 
those reports, and I think TeX is a good way to do it.  I can handle 
harvesting the information, putting it in TeX markup format, etc.  Some 
of the remaining questions are:

1) The TeX daemon the Jonathan Fine wrote about 
<http://www.pytex.org/doc/euro2002.pdf> seems like a great approach for 
repeated calls to TeX.  Has anyone worked with this recently?  Does this 
work with current TeX distributions?

2) I want to package up this software for remote installation, including 
the TeX portion.  I know I'll need some subset of the TeX Directory 
Structure, but I'd like to minimize the number of files.  Any documents 
or suggestions about how to do that?  (I know I'm being vague about what 
I need here, because I don't know yet.  I think I'd like to figure out 
what is an absolute minimal working TeX installation, and then add 
packages, fonts, etc. as needed.)

3) Are there licensing restrictions I need to be aware of, if I just 
re-distribute the software as is, along with my software that invokes it 
and performs other functions?

Thank you!

-pd


-- 
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Peter Davis
  The Tech Curmudgeon - http://www.techcurmudgeon.com
Ideas Great and Dumb - http://www.ideasgreatanddumb.com