From: Andreas Semt <as@...>
Date: 2005-01-18T03:47:41+09:00
Subject: Re: What's the best way to write a Textile-to-PDF::Writer converter?

Austin Ziegler wrote:

> On Mon, 17 Jan 2005 03:51:29 +0900, Andreas Semt <as@computer-leipzig.de> wrote:
> 
>>I am relative new to Ruby, so i ask:
>>What's the best way to develop a *pure* Ruby Textile-to-PDF::Writer
>>converter? I use the Soks Wiki (http://rubyforge.org/projects/soks/ by
>>Tom Counsell) for documentation purpose on work (on a W2K Pro Box). This
>>wiki saves the page content in flat text files in the Textile Markup
>>language, so i want a converter to generate PDF files from these Textile
>>files.  Austin Ziegler has a RubyForge project
>>(http://rubyforge.org/projects/ruby-pdf/) for writing PDF files in Ruby.
>>So all parts of my imaginary pure Ruby Textile-to-PDF::Writer converter
>>are there, however i wonder how to use them?
> 
> 
> 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).
> 
> My problem is mostly that I don't really know Textile, and I'm deep in
> the middle of Text::Format, with a bit of review of a new port of
> Text::Reform. After that, I *must* work on Diff::LCS and Ruwiki again,
> but I also need to get a PDF::Writer release out the door that
> captures a font fix that I made last week (so you definitely want the
> CVS HEAD version of PDF::Writer).
> 
> By contributing something like this to PDF::Writer, I will also make
> sure that as the API for PDF::Writer changes (and I promise that it
> will), the converter is kept up to date.
> 
> -austin

Hello Austin!

a question to your "readme.rb" example file: In the "data.txt" file you say:
--- snip ---
# <b></b> <i></i> can be used within the text with gleeful abandon
--- snap ---

Could you *please* explain how you parse these "bold" and "italic" tags 
in the "readme.rb" file? I have not discovered it yet :-(


John Labovitz wrote:

> Ah.  #ez_text supports "callbacks" for formatting, but #add_text (in the base class) *does* support <b> and <i> formatting. 

Hello John!

Thanks ... will use the #add_text method.

Greetings,
Andreas