[ruby-talk:00793] Re: RD with multi charset

Hi,

> But Tosh, I have a new idea! Please have a look into my `rdswap.rb'. On
> the bottom you can see, that I have put the help text, that can be
> displayed by useing `rdswap.rb -h'. I would have used RD to write it, so
> that others could generate a doc from it.
> 
> But then I think we could need a `rd2txt' tool. That could propably
> introduced into the Ruby standard distribution! Then I could use RD to
> write my help text, *and* use that filter within my script to display
> the text as pure ASCII onto the display. Something like:
> 
> 	#!/bin/env ruby -s
> 
> 	require "rd2txt";
> 	
> 	if $h or $help
> 	   print rd2txt(DATA.read);
> 	end
> 	:
> 	:
> 	__END__
> 	=begin
> 	= Purpose:
> 	Bla bla bla bla
> 	=end
> 	
> What do you think?

Before your proposal, I've thought about rd2txt once.
* RD seems like plain text, so there is less need of rd2txt than pod2txt.
* Maybe, rd2txt will be dependent on Language.
* Some feature will be ignored by rd2txt.(But it is not so important.)
* rd2txt will ignore blank lines. But writer can give a mean to blank
  line. So, sometimes RD will be more easy to read than txt.

In addition, when you want to translate RD to txt dynamically such as
your proposal, there is a problem of cost for translation.
It is not so easy to solve, I suppose.

---
Tosh