Context: I'm a university lecturer and therefore facing the same tasks whenever I prepare for a new semester. One of them is creating course material with LaTeX which includes a syllabus, slides for each meeting, a bibliography, and notes that I use while teaching (containing a schedule for each session, didactic objectives etc.). Right now I always create these documents as single files; I can use documents from a previous semester as templates, but I have to replace all the information for each document type at least once. This is why I came up with the idea that inspired my question:
Is there a possibility to have some sort of master document that contains relevant meta data that I can access from within other documents (e.g. create a beamer document for each session from a template with the titles, expand a short bibliographic reference within the on the syllabus document into a full entry based on a list of texts within the master document)? I am not talking about the import/export of a whole file but rather picking specific lines/paragraphs and copying them/creating new documents from them based on a routine/template. I thought about workarounds with Python but wanted to see if this could be done entirely with LaTeX first.
Edit/Addendum: To give you all an example: I plan my courses with pen & paper. When I'm ready to create documents, I always start with the syllabus. It contains titles, dates, brief descriptions, bibliographic references, information about the course as such etc. Then I create notes and slides for each session. There I copy some of the information from the syllabus at least twice (e.g. titles, dates, bibliographic data). I am looking for a way that allows me to create a master document where I store this information once so that I can generate notes, slides etc.
csvsimple
to read the appropriate row. But a more specific example of what you're trying to do would be nice.