We are looking for a good way to produce documents for print like the one below, which have content in them that is shared with other pages (the scanned document below is one page in a 102-page booklet). For example, the “Desired Outcome(s)” section is restated on several other pages. When we want to tweak or add to it, we currently have to locate all of the places where the text is, and then copy/paste among them. I’m sure I don’t have to explain to you why this is problematic.
These pages are currently made in Adobe something-or-other and I’m not very fond of it, so I have happily been given the task to port them into something that avoids the manual copy-pasting.
Is this a job for LaTeX? I’ve only dabbled in it but if you think LaTeX is the right tool for this job then please point me in the right direction to start learning.
There’s always any web language that reads from a database and outputs HTML (PHP and MySQL, for example; storing our shared text blocks in a MySQL database, or something similar), but I’ve had numerous problems in the past trying to format things for print; is there a good guide out there for making print-formatted HTML pages? I’m aware of the CSS media=”print” property but that’s about the extent of my knowledge in this area.
If you consider something from the TEX area, I’d strongly suggest looking at ConTEXt, since it is much less aimed at scientific papers and much more at creating pretty free-form layout. As dmckee said, you could use LaTeX for that and if you have someone in-house who already has the required expertise, great. But if not, well, the number of books on LaTeX is way higher, but last time I looked, most of them did not really present any advice I’d be willing to follow. (I could do things like what you presented in LaTeX or ConTeXt, although it’s been a while.)