Use cases

The use case that drove me to begin work on this library has been to automate the building of slides that are tedious to compose by hand. As an example, consider the task of composing a slide with an array of 10 headshot images of folks in a particular department, with the person’s name and title next to their picture. After doing this a dozen times and struggling to get all the alignment and sizes to the point where my attention to detail is satisfied, well, my coding fingers got quite itchy.

However I believe a broader application will be server-side document generation on non-Windows server platforms, Linux primarily I expect. In my organization, I have found an apparently insatiable demand for PowerPoint documents as a means of communication. Once one rises beyond the level of project manager it seems the willingness to interpret text longer than a bullet point atrophies quite rapidly and PowerPoint becomes an everyday medium. I’ve imagined it might be pretty cool to be able to generate a “presentation-ready” deck for a salesperson that includes a particular subset of the product catalog they could generate with a few clicks to use in a sales presentation, for example. As you come up with applications I’d love to hear about them.