"MailMerge" for CSV + Markdown

Question

I remember from my MS Office days the Mail merge feature: I had a table in an Excel sheet, a template in Word and Mail Merge created a Word document from each row in the Excel sheet.

I now have completely changed over to plain text files: CSV for tables and Markdown for text and I would like to process the CSV and template into a stack of Markdown files (which I then convert via Pandoc to HTML/PDF).

A) Mail Merge"-type of tool

Does such a "Mail Merge"-type of tool exists for this workflow? I'd prefer a command line tool, because everything else in the tool chain is cli-based.

B) Tool for both directions

The coolest feature would be if the converting were possible two ways:

CSV+Markdown template --> Bunch of Markdown documents

and vice versa

Bunch of Markdown documents --> CSV+Markdown template

Answer 1

I was looking for something similar, and since I could not find it, I wrote a small python script following the principles outlined by rd_nielsen.

https://gist.github.com/frederik-elwert/5d0fee06aad946c75ef03084a2684233

You can call it like this:

python3 pandoc-merge.py --csv addresses.csv -o merged_letter.pdf letter_template.md 

In your template, you can use {{ variable }} and other jinja2 constructs to insert content from the fields of your CSV file.

Answer 2

Convert the *.csv file to separate *.txt files for the data and use this tool, a *.pdf file can be imported as a background along with 5 *.txt files for the data to be "imposed / merged" on top of the pdf file.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/vdprocessor/

Answer 3

If you were into R and modern R scripting:

You could use R's knitr package, write a little .Rmd file and "knit" the document to markdown+html (+ optionally .docx and pdf) in one fell swoop with the Rscript command line tool.

knitr has a "keep_md" option in the YAML front matter.

Together with the blogdown R package and static site generator Hugo you can build a nice templating solution. (You don't have to build a web site).

The "reverse way" you've mentioned (from page to template+csv) is probably not possible.

Answer 4

Consider using a templating language such as Jinja (https://palletsprojects.com/p/jinja/) or Airspeed (https://github.com/purcell/airspeed) as your Markdown template. Then you simply need a little bit of code (both the links above are to Python libraries, so Python would be a sensible language to use) to read the CSV file and run it through the template to generate your final Markdown.

These two steps could be carried out with the IMPORT and EXPORT metacommands of execsql.py. Disclaimer: I wrote it. It can even create a SQLite database on the fly to import the data into. It's a command-line tool. It won't meet your desire to reverse the mail-merge process, however.