[XeTeX] Used XeLaTeX for a Thanksgiving Card here at work

[William Adams]

Everything ``just worked''.

Had to do some fancy find-replace and a bit of manual work to get the  
Excel data files over to LaTeX, then a lot of cleanup and tweaking  
'cause the data was inconsistent or downright incorrect, but the  
typesetting end went perfectly. Best of all, since XeTeX includes a  
graphic only once, referring to it w/ subsequent uses, the file sizes  
were quite manageable (We guesstimated a couple of terabytes otherwise).

1,581 records. It did take about an hour and a half to typeset the  
cards proper on my 2.5GHz G5 though (3,162 pages, each of which had a  
multi-megabyte graphic and every other one had a bitmap signature  
graphic). Aside from the graphic / filesize angle, using InDesign for  
this wasn't a straight-forward option since you can't place a graphic  
using its data merge feature --- I'd've had to use XML to get the  
data in.

My sincere thanks to everyone who helped to make this possible by  
providing XeTeX and LaTeX and TeX!

William



-- 
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications