As a christmas present for a friend, I'm making a leatherbound copy of "The Bro Code" from How I Met Your Mother. This script generates the formatted pdf document of all the articles - takes a csv file with a list of articles and a .tex file showing the format of a single article page, and spits back out a finished PDF. Extremely quick and dirty.

generate-pdf.py

import csv
import re
from subprocess import call

outputfilename = 'BroCode.pdf'
articlecsv = 'Articles.csv'
formatfilename = 'page.tex'

output = open('latextemp.tex','w')
formatfile = open('page.tex', 'r')
pageformat = formatfile.read()
formatfile.close()
t = re.split('(begin{document})',pageformat)
bodyformat = re.split('\\\end{document}', t[2])[0]
output.write(t[0] + t[1])
with open(articlecsv, 'rb') as articles:
	articlereader = csv.reader(articles, delimiter='	', quotechar='|')
	for row in articlereader:
		n = "Article " + row[0]
		text = row[1]
		expl = ''
		if len(row) > 2:
			expl = row [2]
		t = bodyformat
		t = re.sub('ARTICLENAME',n,t)
		t = re.sub('ARTICLETEXT',text,t)		
		t = re.sub('ARTICLEEXPLANATION',expl,t)
		t = re.sub('%','\\\%',t)
		output.write(t)
output.write('\end{document}')
output.close()
call(['pdflatex', 'latextemp'])
call(['mv', 'latextemp.pdf', outputfilename])
call(['rm', 'latextemp.tex', 'latextemp.log', 'latextemp.aux'])

page.tex

\documentclass[english]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[latin9]{inputenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\begin{document}
\noindent \begin{center}
\rule[0.5ex]{1\columnwidth}{1pt}
\par\end{center}

\noindent \begin{center}
\bigskip{}

\par\end{center}

\medskip{}


\noindent \begin{center}
\textbf{\textsc{\Huge{ARTICLENAME}}}
\par\end{center}{\Huge \par}

\noindent \begin{center}
\medskip{}

\par\end{center}

\noindent \begin{center}
{\large{ARTICLETEXT}}
\par\end{center}{\large \par}

\noindent \begin{center}
\smallskip{}

\par\end{center}

\noindent \begin{center}
\textit{\scriptsize{ARTICLEEXPLANATION}}
\par\end{center}{\scriptsize \par}

\noindent \begin{center}
\vfill{}

\par\end{center}

\noindent \begin{center}
\rule[0.5ex]{1\columnwidth}{1pt}
\par\end{center}

\noindent \begin{center}
\pagebreak{}
\par\end{center}
\end{document}