[pdftex] Some questions about integrating TeX in workflow

[John Culleton]

On Monday 01 November 2010 19:15:43 Peter Davis wrote:
> 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

The Context minimal distribution is slimmer than the usual LaTeX 
oriented ones.  Try:

http://wiki.contextgarden.net/ConTeXt_Minimals
-- 
John Culleton, Wexford Press
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