From: Gregory Seidman <gsslist+ruby@...>
Date: 2007-06-08T20:06:41+09:00
Subject: Re: Project idea: Ruby Press

On Fri, Jun 08, 2007 at 04:22:37PM +0900, Victor Zverok Shepelev wrote:
> It seems to be cool idea if somebody with strong experience of printing and
> press would code his experience in Ruby, to have pretty DSL for making
> "book-like" and "newspaper-like" printing.
[...]
> What do you think? Am I reinventing TeX?

Yes, that's what I think :-)

That said, it's plausible that a Ruby DSL frontend to TeX (or, more likely,
LaTeX) would be useful to someone, in much the same way that RJS is a
frontend to (Prototype-/Scriptaculous-backed) JavaScript. I think it would
be a terrible waste to reimplement all the well-tuned, well-tested, and
pretty much bug-free typesetting/flowing/layout TeX/LaTeX provides.

You might also want to look into rtex <http://rubyforge.org/projects/rtex>.
It isn't quite what you're talking about, but a layer of helper methods on
top of it might suit your needs.

> V.
--Greg