[NBLUG/talk] 40 person yearbook roster photo catalog album; Is OpenOffice the answer?

[Jim Oser]

I would like to make a 40 person yearbook roster photo album.

I am envisioning 2 columns per page.

At the top of each column would be the photo, followed by contact  
information and short biography.

The contact information will be stored in a database, firstName,  
lastName, address, city, etc.

I would like to nicely lay out the fields so that

firstName and lastName are on the same line, address is on it's own  
line.

The bio would would be expand to as many lines as necessary.

I would like to be able to format everything, so maybe firstName and  
lastName are larger font, then the rest of the contact information.

I posted this same question to the Apple Consultant's listserve and  
many people came up with different websites that one can upload your  
photos and information, then have it published.

What I am looking for is a method to do all with a program or series  
of programs, without doing copy and paste.

One interesting idea was to use Pages, which is part of the iWork 06  
Mac suite. At first I was excited about this idea because there was  
an Automator module that lets one take FileMaker information and  
store it in Pages. However, I discovered that this had very limited  
capabilities. Maybe in a future version of the iWork suite, which is  
rumored to have database and spreadsheet capabilities, there will be  
a way to do what I want to do but right now, future versions of iWork  
are just vaporware.

This isn't a Linux question; it's more of an OpenSource question.

Can I use perl, php, tcl, with MySQL or another database to do what I  
want? Also remember that it isn't straight text, I have photos, as  
well as wanting to display everything in two columns per page.

I am trying to figure out how to get data out of a database and into  
a nice multipage multicolumn document.

Also interesting, I went to the Mac developer website and it looks  
like Pages is really XML.

Now that I formulated this email. I am thinking I should google:

"desktop publishing" +"open source" +"database"

This brings up OpenOffice.

Is OpenOffice the answer?

Jim