georg@exunido.uucp (Georg A. M. Heeg) (11/21/88)
In article <391@tigger.cs.bham.ac.uk> mas@cs.bham.ac.uk (Angela Sasse <SasseMA>) writes: >I'm looking for something like a mailmerge facility that can be >used on a Sun with an Apple laserwriter. We have emacs, TeX etc. We had the same problem in February this year. We looked closely on some mail merge systems and ended up writing one. As Smalltalk-80 software house we did it in Smalltalk-80. It runs on all Smalltalk-80-platforms available: Sun, Apollo, HP9000-300, Cadmus, Macintosh and Atari and will soon be ported to 80386-MSDOS systems. A port to Tektronix Smalltalk-80 should be no problem. It has a Mail-Merge browser, addresses are parsed from plain text ("like writing an address on an envelope"). It knows about formatting these addresses in different stiles depending from the country the receipient lives. Filters are arbritary Smalltalk-80 block expressions resulting in a boolean value. Similarely text components are blocks resulting a string or a text (i.e. a string with emphasis). It is fully integrated into the Smalltalk-80 system. This implies that a text component block could ask an expert system (written in HUMBLE e.g.) or a data base during evaluation... Letters are almost wysiwig. The major exception is the not-one-to-one size of the window and the paper. Basic technology to store and retrieve addresses is isam. The system has been written by Hans-Martin Mosner, Andreas Toenne and myself and is in in house now. It will be delivered in full Smalltalk-80 source code. Certainly you have to run Smalltalk-80 on you workstation. Georg Heeg Smalltalk-80 Systems Baroper Str. 337 D-4600 Dortmund 50 phone: (x 49-2 31) 75 13 26 e-mail: georg@unido.uucp