Sometimes, you get stuck with repetitive tasks, like generating the very same document over and over with a few changes in the content. I’m the coordinator of a small choir in a parish, and twice a month I have to print songsheets for the community. I usually try to automate as many tasks as I can, but LaTeX output is quite tricky. Here’s my attempt to write a program that spits out a .tex file.

For my task, I decided to rely on a Java solution, but the idea applies to every programming language. I already have the songs organized in a database, so I only need to iterate through the records and generate a .tex file. But how? First, I need to define how my .tex file should look. …

Some time ago, I wrote a blog post about generating LaTeX code with a template engine. Yesterday, I finished an application for a client which had a lot of templates; since my hands were already dirty in the template clay, I decided to revisit the whole idea and come up with some sort of merging tool. And yes, there’s also a duck involved.

I was playing with some code and, all of a sudden, I actually came up with something interesting: what if we have a tool that merges a list of datasources into a template and generate the output? Of course, I was aiming at TeX and friends, but the tool could be used for other contexts as well. Everything was ready, but I needed a name. Then: …