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I have a strange beast of a technical report format for my job that I would like to port to TeX to help formatting. The problem is I'm not sure where to start.

The essential problem is this: every page of the report is a tabular form. Cover page has boxes to input document control data, and a central section for a summary, that can include text, as well as tables and pictures (article-style). Body pages have across the top and along the side, text boxes (which, other than the page number, contain the same document control data as boxes on the cover page) and a main area for the report.

What I would like is to create a format of some type that would allow for the document control data to be initialized for the whole report, and then let me write, article - style, in a large tabular field on each page.

Is that even possible?

D_Forsman
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    My approach would be to write an article style report separately, and then import each PDF page from it into the tabular region of a second strangely formatted document. Part 2 of this answer, http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/166418/put-entire-thesis-on-one-a0-poster/166442#166442, shows how to import a separate document into figures. But the approach should be similar for tables or tabular, I think. – Steven B. Segletes May 30 '14 at 13:30
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    what do you mean by "article style" article has sections and content flows from page to page, do you need text to flow from one tabular cell to another? Or will a simple minipage surfice? – David Carlisle May 30 '14 at 14:05
  • Yeah, I would need the content to flow from one page to the next. If I were to export it as individual pages, I would probably prefer to import the .tif files into the excel format using a VBA macro - probably easier than writing and debugging a tabular fromat – D_Forsman Jun 02 '14 at 07:10
  • OK, looking that up I would probably have to call latex2pdf and then pdfseparate from VBA somehow and then import. And then my question is no longer a TeX question. – D_Forsman Jun 02 '14 at 07:53

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