Document Production

Hi,

This may be a beginner's question, but I can't find the answer in the
XSL-List archives.

What is the simplest way - if any - to produce business documents
incorporating runtime XML data?

I'm working on a application where we integrate information from
mainframe and pc sources and then wish to merge it into consumer
documents.

We're already turning our result sets into XML - we used a DCD schema
and were able to communicate with a third party program coded to our
schema first time - and I would really like to be able to do something
simple and efficient about our document production.

The guys from the big printer have said that they can accept anything
reasonable - eg Postscript, PDF, even Word DOCs.

We can talk to a print component via COM, Corba or Java. I would like to
be able to merge our runtime data into pre-designed documents or
stylesheets, either directly through API calls or by creating a data
file and merging this in - again, we can create any reasonable format,
from XML to CSV inclusive.

I have done solutions involving server-side word processors and macros
in the past, but feel that there should be a better way of doing things
by now.

Many thanks for any suggestions -

Francis.
-- 
Francis Norton.


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