Adding Legal Terms & Conditions to a Word "Template"

P

Peter Manse

I work for a magazine publisher. The magazines generate
hundreds of contracts per month. Legal has created Word
documents that are printed, copied and distributed to our
editors who then fill in the blanks and send them out for
signatures. The process is all manual with no controls.
I'm trying to fix that.

I've built a web app using classic ASP code that I need
some help with. Here's the idea:

1. A photo editor, for example, uses a series of
dropdowns to determine which one of the many contract
templates he has to use. [This code is done.]

2. Once we've got the template, we know what terms and
conditions it needs. The editor provides the data (vendor
name, due date, fee, etc.) which is stored in SQL along
with the ID of the template. [This code is done.]

3. Using the data stored in step 2, a PDF is created with
all terms and conditions filled in. [This is where I'm
looking for direction.]

I'm overwhelmed with the number of programming options I
have. The lawyers use Word to build their "templates"
(which are really just .docs) and I don't want to change
their workflow too much. So, I think step 3 could break
down something like this:

a. The lawyers build the Word docs and I teach them how
to add bookmarks where each term or condition would go.

b. The web app would have an import function that would
open the .doc, convert it to XML, and store the XML in
SQL.

c. The print event would merge the XML doc with the terms
and conditions and create a PDF using Distiller or
PDFWriter.

d. Finally, the app would open the resultant .pdf in
Reader for the user to print locally or email as required.

Overall, does this approach work? Is there a better one
you can think of?

Any ideas on how to approach the merge in step c?

Thanks for your thoughts, and Happy Holidays to anyone
who took the time to read all of this. For the rest of
you, bah humbug! ;-)
 

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