Using Inkscape in Batch Mode

Recently I had to make and print a lot of certificates, each with different names and affiliations. There are programs in the Office environment which do this. They are called as Mail Merge, primarily being used for sending mass mails to many individuals.
Basically following happens:
You have a database of Names / Addresses and Affiliations with you. Lets say there are 500 names in this database. If you want to make certificates for everyone of them, it is not very bright to manually add every name to the certificates. What the program does is takes this list of names, and inserts it into a template and generates a file for each entry in the database. Which is to be printed.
I had designed a certificate for one of the programs using a Free Software   SVG Editor Inkscape, initially the number of entries was not large, but then they became too much for me to manage manually.
So then there is small plugin called the Inkscape Generator that came to help  me big time.
This is something that I had been exactly looking for.
As explained on the page for the plugin the database has to be in a csv format, which can be conveniently generated and edited in any of the spreadsheet programs like Calc for Libre Office. With this it becomes super-easy to generate pdf’s for each of the entries in the database.
Once all the pdf’s have been generated using pdftk one can simple join all the files in a single pdf file and print at one go.
To join:

pdftk *.pdf cat output combined.pdf

As simple as this.
 
 
 

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