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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Oct 2017
    Posts
    1

    Best program/language for creating document templates with hundreds of variables?

    All,

    First time poster. Long time follower. I'm an attorney; and I need to create a program that solves the following scenario. First a little background. I frequently draft and negotiate heavy-duty, language intensive commercial contracts and/or commercial leases. Many of my clients are developers who own tens/hundreds of millions of dollars of real estate. Most of the time, they want a 100 page document turned around very, very quickly (24-48 hours). I'm sick and tired of doing it the old fashioned way: Pull a recent document, manually read the document and insert deal-specific terms. Among other things, not only is it tedious, but it's prone to human error. So here's what I'd like to do:

    1) Create a standard template that already contains boilerplate clauses which are contained in every contract/lease.
    2) Depending on the deal, I'd like to click a drop-down box and insert Clause #1. Once I do this, the entire document morphs to match Clause #1 and only allows me to only access and input other, certain clauses via a dropdown box.
    3) Once the document morphs, I want to insert Clause #2, which further morphs the document and only allows be to access certain other clauses (based on my previous selection of Clause #1 and Clause #2) via a drop down box.
    4) So forth and so on.

    I trust that makes sense. If it doesn't please let me know, I'd be happy to elaborate. About me: I have a basic understanding of Python, as I took a course through code academy. But, I don't know how to write a program; or how to make that come to life - so any advice on that would help too.

    Jay

  2. #2
    Arjay's Avatar
    Arjay is offline Moderator / EX MS MVP Power Poster
    Join Date
    Aug 2004
    Posts
    13,490

    Re: Best program/language for creating document templates with hundreds of variables?

    I'm not sure the language matters, but the approach does. What format are the documents in? I ask because some formats allow for embedded fields that you can merge with the data (such as docx or pdf). If all you care about in the end is the printed version then you can chose the format and use any language that can manipulate the format. Along with all of this, you'll probably need to store the options/document snippets in a database. It's an interesting challenge.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Feb 2018
    Location
    Warsaw
    Posts
    1

    Re: Best program/language for creating document templates with hundreds of variables?

    Try Jinja2 a full featured template engine for Python

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