From: Quintus <sutniuq@...>
Date: 2011-07-21T00:44:48+09:00
Subject: [RDoc internals] Changing the RDoc formatter

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Hi there,

I'm currently writing on a PDF generator for RDoc based on LaTeX. I'm
already achieving my first readable results, but now I wanted to add
that nice cross-referencing support we see in the Darkfish-generated
pages. I know the responsible class is RDoc::Markup::ToHtmlCrossref and
wrote a class RDoc::Markup::ToLaTeXCrossref that basicly does the same
thing as the ToHtmlCrossref class, just using \href instead of <a> and a
labeling mechanism. However, I can’t figure out how to make RDoc use the
formatter *correctly*. At the moment, I'm doing it by hand using an ugly
monkeypatch of RDoc:

==================================================
class RDoc::CodeObject

   LATEX_FORMATTER = RDoc::Markup::ToLaTeX.new

  #...

  def latex_description
    LATEX_FORMATTER.convert(comment)
  end

end
==================================================

This allows me in my LaTeX ERB templates to just call the
#latex_description method of a CodeObject (instead of #description,
which seems to default always to the ToHtmlCrossref formatter) to get
the fully formatted comment. Do I really have to do this monkeypatch?
Isn’t there another way, like, say, setting the wanted formatter on an
instance of the generator class (in my case RDoc::Generator::PDF_LaTeX)?

And btw, why do we need a separate Generator and Formatter class? Nearly
the whole work of processing the parsed input is done in the formatter,
the generator then just writes it out to a file or whereever. Is this
really the sole purpose of a generator? If so, why is there a such small
amount of documentation of adding new subclasses of RDoc::Markup::Formatter?

(I'm using Ruby 1.9.2-p290 and RDoc 3.8)

Valete,
Marvin
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