I'm writing a piece of software to generate and print nametags. The issue I'm having is that nametags need to be formatted the same, but have different values (ie. different names, titles), and can be on different sizes of paper. So I need an efficient way to store a sort of 'template' that has certain formatting info (alignment, size and location relative to document's dimensions) and has placeholders for values to be substituted in. Then, at runtime, I need to be able to provide the dimensions of the nametag and the field values, to return a printable document.My current approach is to have a bunch of pre-written HTML documents which have tables and different sizes, and then substituting the cell values with the given information. The problem with this is that HTML tables are really limited on positioning and sizing of elements. Plus, I end up needing to write javascript to resize and translate elements to handle different sizes of paper and really long field values, which limits code reusability as everyone needs to have the same JS or the files will produce different nametags.Is there a better way to do this? Is there a printable document type that uses relative sizing and positioning for elements, such that if the values are edited the formatting will be preserved?I would write my own file type (probably an XML structure) but then anyone using these files would have to use additional code to read my document and turn it into something printable.
Is it possible to make a printable 'template' document?
file structure;presentation;formatting;document;pdf