How to Make a Product Catalogue That Doesn't Look Like a Dissertation

TUGboat, Volume 34 (2013), No. 3 263 How to make a product catalogue that to produce in this way. So in 2004 I set out to create doesn’t look like a dissertation a more robust system to produce it. My goals were to create a system that would Jason Lewis produce a product catalogue automatically from our Abstract database, wouldn’t require long and detailed proof reading to ensure pricing was correct, be something I Needing a robust way to produce a catalogue from could delegate to staff for catalogue production, and a product database, Adobe InDesign, DocBook and that the staff need not have any special technical LAT X were evaluated. LAT X was favoured due to its E E knowledge to use the system. layout flexibility and non-proprietary nature. The challenge was to query the database and produce 2.1 Tools I looked at A suitable LTEX for the catalogue First, InDesign: Native LATEX was unable to query the database, so templating tools were investigated. Template • InDesign at the time had limited scripting ability. Toolkit (TT) was chosen over PHP, favouring its Perl This has improved now and you can write scripts roots and broader applicability. Using TT and DBI for in Microsoft Visual Basic or JavaScript. • no proper database connectivity at the time. querying the database a dynamically generated LATEX document can be quickly constructed. TT filters are There are now numerous commercial tools that developed to check and correct user supplied content allow you to link InDesign to a database. • proprietary software (I prefer to use free tools if for constructs that would cause the LATEX compiler to fail. Filters are also used to sanitise Windows file possible). paths for use in LATEX. Second, DocBook [1]: Styling the document to look like a product cat- • limited formatting and layout capabilities alogue was achieved using sans serif fonts, flowfram • recommends using LATEX for advanced layouts thumb tabs, colourful chapter and section headings • no database connectivity developed using tikz, long tables that allow page • plain text, easy to script using a template tool breaks, alternating row colours, wrapping of para- Third, LATEX: graph text around images and the highlighting of • flexible layout capabilities new products. Full page PDFs are included in the • free and open source document for the covers, front matter and adverts. • no database connectivity The result is system to generate a product cata- • plain text, easy to script using a template tool logue, quickly and easily directly from our database using free and open source tools. This has reduced 3 The challenge the workload in producing a catalogue and increased 3.1 How to script LAT X? staff productivity and efficiency. E I could have written the system in native LATEX but 1 Introduction LATEX has no way to retrieve data from a database. The other option was to choose a tool like PHP or I produce an 80 page full colour product catalogue Template Toolkit (TT). in LATEX. This paper outlines the tools I used to implement the system, link it to our database and 3.2 PHP style the catalogue for printing. Pros: PHP is widely used. We print a new catalogue every six months and it has approximately 1000 products, 16 full page Cons: geared towards HTML/web; it’s PHP; it’s colour adverts and takes less than two minutes to not Perl. build from the command line. 3.3 Template Toolkit 2 Why did I write this? Pros: I am part owner of a small wholesale distribution • Generalised to templating anything business in Australia. When we established the busi- • not PHP ness in 2001, we had approximately 40 products in • written in Perl our catalogue, for which a one page price list and • Template::Plugin::Latex can output PDF order form in Microsoft Excel sufficed. directly; can build manually for demonstration. As we grew the business and added more prod- Astute readers might notice a slight bias towards ucts to our portfolio, the catalogue became unwieldy Perl. This was mainly due to having prior knowl- How to make a product catalogue that doesn’t look like a dissertation 264 TUGboat, Volume 34 (2013), No. 3 edge of Perl and meant I didn’t have to learn a new delimiter above strips the final newline from that line programming language. upon output; similarly, a minus sign after an opening delimiter (as below) removes a leading (preceding) 3.4 Database driven documents newline. Template Toolkit uses Perl’s DBI for database access, 4.3 Read a CSV file which means it can retrieve data from just about anything. Our data is stored in Microsoft SQL and Let’s suppose we have this table of data: Microsoft Access. I use DBI Proxy [2] to connect to the MS Access database. Table 1: simple-example.csv FirstName LastName FavouriteNumber 3.5 Compiling reliably Building the catalogue from source is a two step pro- Jason Lewis 34 cess: running Template Toolkit, and then passing its Joe Blogs 2 output through pdflatex. I created a Makefile to do Frank Sinatra 88 this, but often the document would require multiple runs to ensure all the cross-references were correct. A Here is TT code to parse it, using DBI to access tool such as latexmk [3] or rubber [4] helps with this the file as a database in the current directory: by providing a single command that will repeatedly [%- USE db = DBI( run pdflatex until all cross-references are stable. database => "DBI:CSV:f_dir=." ) -%] [%- FOREACH item = db.query( 3.6 User interface for entering data "SELECT * from simple-example.csv") -%] to the catalogue I needed a user interface for data entry. I chose MS FirstName: [% item.firstname %] \ Access as being easy to script, it was a familiar user LastName: [% item.lastname %] \ Favourite: [% item.favouritenumber %] interface for the staff, and I already owned it. The [% END %] downside is that of course it is a proprietary tool. Note that the column headings of table1 were sani- 4 Template Toolkit Primer tised to lower case by DBI::CSV. Here’s how I scripted LATEX using Template Toolkit. 4.4 Write your own parser 4.1 Install Template Toolkit Well not quite, but Template Toolkit makes it easy TT Cpanminus [5] is a great tool to retrieve, unpack, to implement a parser: build and install Perl modules from CPAN: #!/usr/bin/env perl use Template; cpanm Template die "no TT filename given" if (@ARGV != 1); cpanm DBD::CSV my $tt = Template->new({ cpanm DBI INCLUDE_PATH => ’.’, cpanm Template::Plugin::DBI INTERPOLATE => 1, Now we have Template Toolkit, DBI, and some ancil- }) || die "$Template::ERROR\n"; lary modules installed, and can try writing a simple Hello World. my $input = $ARGV[0]; 4.2 Hello World # process input template, substituting variables: tpage is a simple script supplied by TT that parses $tt->process($input, $vars) || die $template->error(); a template file supplied on the command line and outputs it to standard output. Given this two-line This creates a TT object and parses the file whose template file: name is supplied on the command line. So far, this just provides the same functionality as tpage. [% str = ’Hello TUG2013’ -%] [% str %] 4.5 Build your LATEX document We can parse and output it like this: Here we write our LATEX document, including the $ tpage helloworld.tt TT lines to read from the database. Hello TUG2013 [%- USE db = DBI( database => Anything within [% %] will be treated as TT code "DBI:CSV:f_dir=." ) -%] and executed. The minus sign before the closing \documentclass{article} Jason Lewis TUGboat, Volume 34 (2013), No. 3 265 \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} my $tt = Template->new({ FILTERS => {latex_filter => \&latex_filter}, \title{build-document example} INCLUDE_PATH => ’.’, \author{Jason Lewis} INTERPOLATE => 1, \date{October 2013} }) || die "$Template::ERROR\n"; \begin{document} 5.2.1 More things that need to be filtered [%- FOREACH item = db.query( Then adding more filters is simply a matter of adding "SELECT * from simple-example.csv") -%] a regular expression to search for it and replace it First Name: [% item.firstname %] with whatever is appropriate. Some examples. \\ Last Name: [% item.lastname %] \\ Favourite Number: [% item.favouritenumber %] Degree symbol: \\ \newline $return =~ s/°/\\degree /g; [% END #FOREACH -%] Accented characters: \’{e} \end{document} Transform é into : $return =~ s/é/\\’{e}/g; Output (where mytpage is the script we just saw): Incorrect quotes: Convert beginning-of-line right $ ./mytpage build-document.tt or double quotes to left quotes, and use ASCII apos- \documentclass{article} \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} trophes. $return =~ s/(^|\s)’(.*?)/$1‘$2/g; \title{build-document example} $return =~ s/(^|\s)"(.*?)/$1‘‘$2/g; \author{Jason Lewis} # replace Windows quote (octal 0222) with ASCII ’ \date{October 2013} $return =~ s/\222/’/g; En dash between numbers: Convert minus sign \begin{document} to an en-dash by searching for single minus sign First Name: Jason \\ Last Name: Lewis \\ Favourite Number: 34 \\ \newline between numbers and replacing it with two minus First Name: Joe \\ Last Name: Blogs signs: 1-10 vs. 1--10. \\ Favourite Number: 2 \\ \newline $return =~ s/(\d+)-(\d+)/$1--$2/g; First Name: Frank \\ Last Name: Sinatra A \\ Favourite Number: 88 \\ \newline 5.3 Pass through LTEX commands \end{document} From time to time I needed a way to pass LATEX commands through the filter. I chose an escape of 5 Technical problems <latex> which in hindsight may not have been the 5.1 Escaping special LATEX characters best choice, as it looks too much like XML. We just The text in our database is generated by users, and of- replace it with a backslash: ten cut and pasted from Microsoft Word. It typically $return =~ s/<latex>/\\/g; contains characters that won’t be natively typeset For example, <latex>latex becomes \latex.

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