Hi
It has occurred to me that it would probably be very helpful if we actually made the most of the LaTeX templating possibilities. I am looking at designing a LaTeX .sty which would create macros for most of the layout operations. This way, LaTeX templates could be far easier to maintain, and large portions of them could be standardized across all of the documents that a company uses.
I only got into Latex for using SQL-Ledger and mangled a big bunch of my templates to try and make them all key off a standard template. I didn't quite get it finished because I didn't realise about the SQL-Ledger "include" statement - however, I realise now that it's possible to do this
The idea was to define big lumps of template code in one location and then just build the final result from the template bits, eg do I want a header, do I want a main address block, do I need a standard footer, etc.
As you say 90% of all the templates are identical and just need minor tweaks to turn one into another. Surely we would get some decent templates contributed if it was a small job rather than the current custom build nightmare that it is...
Actually I don't value Latex particularly highly if there is a better PDF building library then anyone feel free to switch to using that instead...
Cheers Ed W