[Gnumed-devel] abstracting templates for letters

[Gour]

Hello!

Reading http://wiki.gnumed.de/bin/view/Gnumed/PatientLetters brought me
to ref.paperwork_templates table which I briefly inspected with pgadmin3
tool (I'm still totally new with Postgres and its tools...) where I've
found out the following:

COMMENT ON COLUMN ref.paperwork_templates.engine IS 'the business layer
forms engine used
         to process this form, currently:
         - T: plain text
         - L: LaTeX
         - H: Health Layer 7
         - O: OpenOffice';

afaik, only OpenOffice is mentioned as the tool for writing letters
based on templates, right?

I'm thinking about the possibility to abstract this mechanism so that
other applications can be used for writing letters, e.g. LyX (LaTeX
front-end) or (my own needs) Emacs.

In my case, I use Emacs for writing notes for some course I'm enrolled
in and markdown markup is used for it which enables me to export those
notes in plethora of formats with the markdown-processing tool (in my
case I use Pandoc - http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/) which can export
markdown into LaTeX/ConTeXt/PDF (via LaTeX)/... and there is even
feature to export to *.odt ;)

However, I'd prefer to be free whether to attach *.odt, *.pdf or
e.g. *.md (markdown) version of the letter in the patient's archive
tree - i.e. I'd leave the present capability to automatically load OO &
add the *.odt to the archive tree as user-option and therefore providing
more general mechanism so that users can add their own application which
they want to use for writing letters based on templates.

In short, my idea is to provide some 'general' mechanism or protocol (if
possible) for sending template-data to external applications instead of
hard-wiring needs of specific applications in order to make GNUmed being
able to work with wide range of applications doing the specific taske -
in the spirit of U**x tools ;)

Don't ask me about the details - I even dunno whether it's possible in
how much refactoring it would involve.

However, it looks I'd have to make my hands dirty with some Python,
although the choice of using Simple Invoices and CMS Made Simple would
require some PHP as well :-)


What do you think?


Sincerely,
Gour

-- 

Gour  | Zagreb, Croatia  | GPG key: C6E7162D
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