Show HN: AutoDocument – Multi-Source Document Generation

7 points by Harlekuin a year ago · 0 comments · 2 min read

Hi there, this post is introducing AutoDocument, a free and open-source document generating web app that connects spreadsheets, databases and user forms into documents such as Microsoft Word and PDFs. It's based on fantastic open sources libraries like https://github.com/elapouya/python-docx-template and headless LibreOffice.

Mail Merge is a pain because it:

- Only converts from Excel to Word

- Uses special field objects in the Word document

- Requires a Microsoft Office License

- Has limited templating options

AutoDocument is a free and easily installable web app that can setup reusable Workflows that convert data from a variety of sources including straight from databases and spreadsheets to several types of outputs, including Word and PDFs. It only uses text based fields such as "{{ myfield }}" instead of special objects. It can deal with logical blocks of text and loops to populate flexible templates including lists and tables.

Features

- Create (optional) user forms to kick off a workflow and link to your users

- Load and save data, templates and output from windows and linux network mounts, as well as S3 and SharePoint libraries.

- Powerful templating based on jinja2 and python-docx-template with logic blocks (like if, while etc) as well as standard field substitution.

- Chain sources together like forms, spreadsheets and SQL queries to create clever workflows

Easily installed by running the container: docker.io/tommalkin/autodocument:latest

Repo: https://github.com/TomMalkin/AutoDocument

Documentation: https://tommalkin.github.io/AutoDocument/

Landing Page: https://autodocument.app/

Container: https://hub.docker.com/r/tommalkin/autodocument

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