Agile Tortoise
Greg Pierce’s blog
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The big catalog project
Though the vast majority of the technical work has been done for some time, I’m finally wrapping up all the organizational and editorial stages of the new catalog for work and getting it off to the printer. Here’s the PDF version (Warning, 10 meg file).
The whole “guts” of the catalog, including table of contents, indexes, etc., are all generated by writing an XML file out of our ERP with all the product data, transforming it to XSL:FO using an elaborate XSLT pass, then sent to XEP to be written out as a PDF file. Takes my laptop about 3 minutes to generate the whole 152 page catalog.
I’ve also written several side applications that work around this setup to generate partial catalogs, based on the items on a quote in the system or other sources…making it easy to produce custom catalogs individualized to a particular customers needs or for material submittals on particular jobs.
It’s been a fun project. I did our first catalog about 8 years ago, manually laying out everything with tedious precision in PageMaker. Not fun. Particularly all the tabular data. It’s neat to come full circle and have all the prep work I did for website be leveraged in print.
