The goal here is to eliminate LaTeX from the process.
Don't do it. LaTeX takes all the pain out of lay-outing.

If you go the Word-way you will have to do the lay-outing yourself and you will be fighting Word's "good intentions" do to things its own way, every inch of the road.

"Printing" straight to PDF is a total nightmare, you will not only have to invent your own layout, but you will have to place all PDF's elements pixel-perfect on every page, calculate the size of all paragraphs, do your own page-setting, splitting paragraphs so they fit on the page, ...

Invest some time in learning a modern LaTeX lay-out package, such as memoir (link to the memoir manual in PDF).

I have been using this for several years now and it works like a charm. The data goes from the database into a Perl program which invokes a Template Toolkit template to write the LaTeX-file which is then handed over to latexmk which runs LaTeX the required number of times to resolve all references and turn it into a beautiful PDF.

Believe me, all my previous "solutions" never worked as smoothly as this and I have high level control at all stages of the process.

Update: Almost forgot, bookmarks to all chapters, sections, subsections, references, tables, figures, footnotes, bibliographic items, ... come for free if you use LaTeX and the hyperref package: see this.

CountZero

A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James

In reply to Re: Seeking Comments & Feedback on Word/PDF project by CountZero
in thread Seeking Comments & Feedback on Word/PDF project by jedikaiti

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