[scribus] How to personalize a booklet?

[John Beardmore]

Sveinn í Felli (IMAP) wrote:
> Ronald Wiplinger (Lists) wrote:
>> On Sat, 2009-07-04 at 10:01 +0100, John Beardmore wrote:
>>> Ronald Wiplinger (Lists) wrote:

>>>> I have a pdf booklet - some are created with Scribus, some are made with
>>>> Acrobat 9Pro.
>>>> These booklets should be sold on a hosted web server (apache with php).
>>>>
>>>> We would be thrilled if we could personalize the booklet during selling,
>>>> like:
>>>>
>>>> 1. add a remark on each page, like    Teacher <name> uses <title>
>>>> booklet
>>>> (the buyer is the teacher)
>>>>
>>>> 2. a personalized additional page (welcome page number 3)
>
> To answer some of your questions:
> 
> Well, I've seen and experimented with such a function. PHP3
> is (maybe was) able to do a search/replace inside any file,
> including PDF's. With a PDF template which includes (even
> several) placeholders e.g. <Name> and <Address> PHP would
> automatically replace the placeholders with data from a DB
> or user input. Handy for making printable invoices and receipts.
> BUT: this only worked with PDFs format 1.2 and older
> (Acrobat 3.x) where pure text was still included (no
> encoding ? no compression). I have an example made with
> PSSCRIPT.DRV version 4.0 from MSWord (v.95?) through
> Distiller 3.01.

Presumably for that matter it would also be possible to make such 
substitutions in a Postscript template, then convert that PDF ?  Could 
PsTools do that conversion ?

Don't know about PHP. Wouldn't making a database report which happens to 
be a tiny awk script be less trouble ?  Depends what you are familiar 
with I guess.


Cheers, J/.
-- 
John Beardmore, MSc EDM (Open), B.A. Chem (Oxon), CMIOSH, AIEMA, MEI
Managing Director, T4 Sustainability Limited. http://www.T4sLtd.co.uk/
Energy Audit, Carbon Management, Design Advice, Sustainable Energy
Consultancy and Installation, Carbon Trust Standard Registered Assessor
Phone: 0845 4561332   Mobile: 07785 563116   Skype: t4sustainability