From: Conrad Schneiker <schneik@...>
Date: 2000-07-17T23:50:02-05:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:04103] Re: OT: Re: P. of least effort -- fragile typesetters

Hi,

Lewis Perin wrote:

> I asked a friend, Bennett Todd (bet@rahul.net), who was nice enough to
> contribute the following along with the offer to correspond with those
> who wish to take this topic further:

...

>   I'm waiting for a new tool, currently under development; when it
>   becomes available I expect to be able to use text with essentially
>   no markup at all, pure straight ASCII text, and parse that to deduce
>   doc structure and add SGML markup.

I be interested in finding out if any of the principles/tricks used by this
anticipated system would be practical for use in extending Ruby RD and rdtool. Is
this something that can be publicly discussed yet?

Charles Hixson wrote (on another thread):

> But it's truly amazing to me that so many languages leave a thing that is so
> intimately related to the success of the language (in the Office area... which
> includes a large part of the database / scripting area).  I'm convinced that a
> large part of the success of Visual Basic, Visual C, MS Access, etc. is the
> ease
> with which reports are generated.  They don't seem to have much advantage over
> the other IDE's as development environments, but they make certain standardized
>
> things very easy, reports prominent among them.

It would be interesting if RD/rdtool evolved into such a system.

Will RD eventually be able to specify executable Ruby code for rdtool to use to
dynamically generate more RD text? That might open up a pretty synergetic
door....

--
Conrad Schneiker
(This note is unofficial and subject to improvement without notice.)