On Sun, Feb 24, 2002 at 06:04:19PM -0600, Ron Johnson wrote: | On Sun, 24 Feb 2002 15:53:16 -0500 dman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: | > On Sun, Feb 24, 2002 at 02:26:58AM -0800, ben wrote: | > | On Saturday 23 February 2002 06:53 pm, Bob Underwood wrote: | > | [snip] | > | > > | > | > > | Is the Star Office 5.2 address book reliable enough for mail merges, or | > | > > | has any other word processor (Applixware?) an address book that can be | > | > > | used for mail merges? | [snip] | > | > Is a "mail merge" an operation by which a form letter is filled in | > with values from a database? If so, the reason such an app is not | > readily apparent is because it is rather easy to script such a thing. | exactly... | | [snip example] | > I'm sure someone more familiar with sh/sed/awk could do it with those | > tools. The point is that with text-based markup like LaTeX or groff | > or DocBook, it is quite easy to come up with a tag system of your own | > and a script to fill in the fields from a DB of your choosing. This | > could be extended to grab the data from a SQL database or an XML file | > or whatever you want. Certainly this script is not robust -- it | > assumes the input is valid. The UNIX philosophy is to Do One Thing | > and Do It Well. As a user you plug the tools together to get your | > work done. Databases already exist. Typesetting tools already exist. | > Plug them together for yourself. | | But then then The Average User would have to learn the tools (read: | programming languages). It's been an end-user operation for 20 years | (going back to WordStar 2.x) even on a nerdy OS like CP/M. | | Remember, The Average User doesn't care about The Unix Way, but | just wants a system that doesn't crash, get infected with virii, | and make him/her learn a lot of "hard" stuff. In this case, all | the man wants is a pre-written system that lets him combine his | form letter with his (probably flat-file) mailing list.
So go ahead and build a system for Average Users to use. You can make millions ... ;-). Then again, maybe not since no one has found it necessary so far (or has found it so trivial that they didn't feel the need to publish it). As I said, I wasn't trying to convince anyone that such a tool is useless, but rather that it can fairly easily be built now using existing tools. -D -- A)bort, R)etry, B)ang it with a large hammer
