[XeTeX] Your advice for generation of tables/forms with decorations?

[BPJ]

2011-04-28 15:14, Kārlis Repsons skrev:
> On Thursday 28 April 2011 09:27:22 André Bellaïche wrote:
>> Use Adobe Illustrator.
>>
>> Typeset the table into a one page PDF file, open the file with Illustrator,
>> and add the decorations. Inport the decorated table using includegraphics.
>
> But I need automation... Meaning, the created (EPS, MetaPost-like etc)
> decorations get composed with text in *TeX!

Do you need automation in the sense of automatized
production of different PDFs with different tables *and*
different graphics in each file? If so Metapost probably is
your best choice for the graphics, though you will probably
need a script (shell, Perl or something else) to generate
the Metapost and *TeX source files. Needless to say that can
get ugly pretty quickly (code to write code -- been there,
done that! ;-). You can have the same script, or another
script invoked by it, invoke ps2pdf to convert Metapost
output to PDF and pdftk to stamp the one PDF with the other
(if you are comfortable with Perl and need a biggish script
for the job there is a PDF::Tk module which I've used, and
searching CPAN for "latex" may also turn up some useful
things), unless you can import the graphics file into the
PDF generated by *TeX from inside *TeX.

/bpj