Hi,
I'm a solicitor <ducks>, and would like to organise my work at the linux commandline, rather than using MS Office. I like cli apps; I like python; I like bash; I like concise; I like the unix philosophy; I like vim; I like Mutt.
However, I don't get chance to use the software that I love at work. Instead, I'm expected to use Word, Outlook and some horrible case management software to manage my documents, and create them from templates. All day long I write letters and other documents on each of my legal cases. I would be exceedingly happy if I could replace this functionality with some nice scripts, so that I could spend my days in front of a nice bash shell.
To do that I'd need a script that:
1. Stores data about a case: I need to be able to store some data (could be a simple key/value store for each case).
2. Store documents for each case: I'd like to store each document I produce along with some information on that document (such as how long it took to prepare). If I use a wordprocessor (such as openoffice) is it possible to quickly extract some 'properties' via a script? Would a better solution be to keep the documents in a text format, such as latex code...?
2. Enable templating: I could have a template document (e.g. a letter) and some of the information could be pulled out from the case data to populate it. I would then amend it for the particular circumstances of my case to then print, save etc.
3. Produce reports: I'd like to be able to scan all my cases to produce reports, such as: which case hasn't received any attention for the longest time, or how much work have I done on all my active cases this week etc.
I recognise that these are probably separate problems that should be solved separately. However, I'd be grateful for any suggestions on how I might solve some of these parts. Thank you for any thoughts.
Thanks in advance, Richard
On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 04:20:49PM -0400, Richard Parsons wrote:
That's a close description of me too except that I'm not a solicitor and I use vile rather than vim (more for historic reasons than anything else, when I was working on Sun Solaris systems xvile was more appropriate).
To my mind that says either a database and you d-i-y the hooks to provide what you want, or possibly (I'm not really all that familiar with the current state of play) a code management system of some sort.
Certainly 1 and 2 would fit into a database quite nicely and even, possibly, the second 2 (!) and 3 as well. You could easily use python to write scripts to extract and insert the data.
On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 2:07 PM, Chris G cl@isbd.net wrote:
On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 04:20:49PM -0400, Richard Parsons wrote:
Thanks for your thoughts.
And ops, sorry for two 2s. If I make progress, I'll keep you informed on my progress if you're interested?
Richard
On 15 Sep 2010, at 21:20, Richard Parsons wrote:
You might want to look at storing your documents in some sort of markup language in a VCS.
I'd take a look at Sphinx (the python documentation generator). It may not do exactly what you want, but it certainly would be a good starting point to look at how to do templating, converting to latex and generating PDFs from restructured text.
Hope that helps
Richard Parsons richard.lee.parsons@gmail.com asked for something:
Well, RT (request-tracker) *could* do all of those and I'm pretty sure that all functions can be accessed from the command line, but sometimes with a little work and perl scripting.
There's probably quicker partial solutions like http://ditz.rubyforge.org/ (maybe doesn't do templating?) and I'm sure there are others around.
Hope that helps,
Thanks everyone for all your suggestions.
On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 11:06 AM, MJ Ray mjr@phonecoop.coop wrote:
It's the first time I've looked at RT, but it does look good. I'm investigating whether or not I can (a) create hard copy document and even better (b) fill in PDF forms...
Thanks for the pointer.
Rich