Although there are reasons why you might want to stay away from perl for this type of application, you actually may have a very good case (no pun intended) for using perl, even with MSFT Word. Any experienced application developer would suggest you use a database for this type of thing, but you already said you dont have one. Therefore, although its not necessarily the obvious choice, perl may actually be a very good fit for you (assuming you are competent with it).

Consider these facts:

TEMPLATING: Perl is probably the best package for developing an easily maintained, well designed templating solution. If you do not 'over engineer' it, you can produce good stuff that works quickly. Moreover, you have *much* better string manipulation and delimiting capabilities than with VB (string manipulation and quoting is one of the biggest annoyances with VB) which plays into any 'fill in the blank' templating system.

GUI INTERFACE: Perl in combination with a very easy 'front end' will almost certainly be a design requirement in order to make the law office happy. They should not have to know that perl is at the 'guts' of your application. I would recommend using HTA (since it already leverages your knowlege of HTML, as opposed to MSFT office and VBA. Unless you know VB and you don't mind being 'locked' into MSFT office, steer away from VB)

OFFICE HTML: Most people don't realize this, but you can use perl to easily spit out MSFT office documents by simply saving the documents as MSFT office HTML. This enables you to steer clear of the proprietary binary format while still maintaining the precise formatting that lawyers go nuts over. What this means is that you can build a data driven extensible application that does not require a backend database or any fancy conversion software to output MSFT compatible documents. Again, a backend database is good to have for this kind of thing, but not an absolute requirement.

REPURPOSE YOUR PERL CODE: This also means that you can *repurpose* your code to output *anything* that supports text (for example, a lawyer will love you when you tell them that your document 'fill in' solution can also be used to help track billable hours, and also send it to their timekeeping software, this will also win you brownie points for being a genius).

In reply to Re: Re: parse MS Word Template fields for legal documents by dimar
in thread parse MS Word Template fields for legal documents by Anonymous Monk

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