On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 04:20:49PM -0400, Richard Parsons wrote:

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.

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).

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.

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 15 Sep 2010, at 21:20, Richard Parsons wrote:

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.

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