I am developing a workflow for a project which comes up periodically during the year. I would for a nonprofit which creates cards for each of their workers to send out to their supporters. The cards contain information like name, spouse’s name, birthdays, children’s names (if there are any). This information is collected from the worker using a form on the web and can be supplied as comma separated values. So far so good — fairly straightforward.
Here is the wrinkle. Some of the eventual text uses possessive and regular pronouns. “I”, “me”, “We”, “our”, when there is more than one person they would be plural, when only one person they would be singular. This is obviously not generated in the form filling, but could be done either using mail merge in Word or XML import in InDesign.
I could use Word and develop the pronouns in the copy to be imported using the rudementary if/else switches in mail merge.
I could massage the csv into xml and use XSLT to create xml that can be imported into tags. This is a more complicated solution but potentially more elegant because I might, somehow be able to import the photographs with the xml using some clever naming techniques that no one will ever be able to remember when I am no longer working here.
If you wanted to create a workflow which would you use? Or would you do something completely different?
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