creating a pdf version of a complicated form, populated with data from a database

[karl at aspodata.se]

Christopher Ryan:
> Thanks everyone for the ideas. Lots to think about!  Not recreating all the
> lines, boxes, and other adornments on the form makes sense.

Recreating the document seems to be overkill. Also it could fail if the 
people receiving it does ocr and expect things to be in their "usual" 
places.

The way to do this with the least overhead is to extend the PostScript 
example I sent. That said, I don't know much about forms in pdfs and if 
that would be way to solve this.

> [...], and I
> remember the workflow, data management, and preparations for billing being
> very tedious.

Billing is a thing that is suitable to be done automatic.
You have to know:
. the general requirements for invoices in your country (usually 
  specified in some law or similar)
. what layout you prefer
and write a program that converts your billing data to (I suggest) a 
tex/latex file. If you need help with that ask for help.

>  I've created a REDCap project to manage most of the
> operation.

>From what I read on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDCap, REDCap seems 
to be a bit inflexible. Also it is done starting from an excel file, 
which implies working on a MS-Windows box.

> R has a nice capability to interface with REDCap via an API. R
> is the only programming language I have any facility with.

If you are confortable with R, then use it. And there seems to be good 
support for latex with Sweave and knitr. But I havn't found any way,
in R, to print out lines like "22.5 675 moveto (X) show". This is how
far I got:

> data <- c(22.5, 675, "X")
> print(data)
[1] "22.5" "675"  "X"   
>

And knitr is a little vague on how it does things.

Regards,
/Karl Hammar