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A year ago, I worked for a company doing .NET to create a customer report. They use DevExpress to generate a report based on customers' requirements. However, I realized the way it works is just painful and very time-consuming, because everytime they changed the requirement, we have to change a layout a bit due the the font and text data. At that time, I knew nothing a Latex, but I always think there must be a way to work smarter.
Today, while playing with TikZ package, I realized that Latex is just like another programming language, it's super powerful and flexible in term of drawing figure, positioning text, etc... But I'm not sure if we can use a variable inside Latex or not, for example, if I created a layout, says:

x^2 + 2x = A

Then is it possible for A to be a variable so that every time I need to pull out a new data from Database, I can just fit them in that particular position. I've just learned Latex for couple months, so there are many things that are new to me. In advance, I apologize if my question sounds a little insane or nonsense. Lastly, thank you for your time reading.

Johannes_B
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roxrook
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    You are looking for the concept of TeX macros. You should look for \newcommand in your favorite LaTeX manual/documentation. – Caramdir Jul 24 '11 at 21:39

1 Answers1

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Best way in my opinion would be to use a template.tex:

\documentclass{paper}
\begin{document}
$x^2 + 2x = \A$
This is some other data: \B.
\end{document}

And to produce a little document42.tex file for every document you want to generate, like this:

\def\A{…}
\def\B{…}
\input{template}

just fill the … with appropriate data.

Stéphane Gimenez
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  • As Caramdir pointed out, use \newcommand instead of \def to achieve more than just simple substitutions. – Stéphane Gimenez Jul 24 '11 at 21:48
  • And use \input instead of \include in this case. – Display Name Jul 24 '11 at 21:51
  • Indeed – Stéphane Gimenez Jul 24 '11 at 21:59
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    And when you feel comfortable with that, proceed in the way of LaTeX;) - learn to write packages (see clsguide.pdf in your TeX distribution, and possibly these questions here: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/2416/reference-guide-to-begin-writing-a-class-and-or-a-package http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/528/style-class-tutorials http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/8750/make-your-own-sty-files); then you might want to master one (or more) of a few packages supporting the key-value input, etc... – mbork Jul 24 '11 at 23:43