From: Andreas Semt <as@...>
Date: 2005-01-17T23:00:45+09:00
Subject: Re: What's the best way to write a Textile-to-PDF::Writer converter?

John Labovitz wrote:
> On Jan 16, 2005, at 12:32 PM, Austin Ziegler wrote:
>>
>> I don't know, offhand, but if you want to definitely do this and
>> contribute it to PDF::Writer, I will happily work with you on that --
>> this has been part of a goal of PDF::Writer (the specification of a
>> better formatting language than the simple one that I support right
>> now).
> 

Hello Austin!

I want just a little converter for my Soks content, no big deal. However 
i could (later) expand this little converter to a more general tool for 
converting Textile-to-PDF using PDF::Writer.

> 
> (This is mostly a response to Andreas; it probably won't be news to 
> Austin.)
> 
> I've been using PDF::Writer to do some graphical charting, so I'm not so 
> familiar with its text processing.  But I'll take a guess on how to do 
> this.
> 
> When you use the #ez_text method, the text you pass in can be a big 
> block of text, possibly spanning multiple pages.  The text can have 
> HTML-like markup.  The text processing code in PDF::Writer will 
> apparently handle all the details of wrapping lines, spacing paragraphs, 
> and breaking pages.  So for a first pass (assuming you don't need to 
> control page breaks), you might work on a simple Textile-to-ez_text 
> converter.

Hello John!

Thanks for that hint. However "ez_text" does not support formatting of 
any kind (for example: bold, italic, ...). So i will use other methods.

> If you haven't seen it, you should look at RedCloth, which is an 
> implementation of a Textile-to-HTML converter.  It doesn't appear to be 
> very extensible -- its HTML generation seems all wrapped up in the 
> parsing -- but at only 1000 lines of code, maybe it would be a good 
> thing to build on.
> 

Yes, it's a good starting point. "redcloth.rb" and Austin Ziegler's 
"readme.rb" example will guide me ;-)

Greetings,
Andreas

> -- 
> John Labovitz
> Macintosh support, research, and software development
> John Labovitz Consulting, LLC
> johnl@johnlabovitz.com |  +1 503.949.3492 | www.johnlabovitz.com/consulting
> 
> 
> 
>