Ddoc to PDF

[Gerrit Wichert]

Am 17.10.2010 19:45, schrieb Walter Bright

> Apparently, it is fairly simple to convert plain text files to PDF.
>
> http://re-factor.blogspot.com/2010/10/text-to-pdf.html
>
> Which suggests to me it should be equally simple to create a Ddoc
> macro file to allow Ddoc to emit pdf files directly.
>
> Anyone want a nice weekend project to product this?
>

I don't think that it is the best idea to produce a pdf in one step.
First PDF is really complicated (and also evolves over time).
Second this would require dmd to determine the layout of the generated
documentation.

We could easily avoid the frist point. When we just make ddoc generating
xsl-fo a tool like apache fop can be used to generate pdf or html from
it. This is what xsl-fo is designed for. It's not rocket science to
create a xsl-fo layout. But the second problem remains. If i where a
company or community writing libraries in d i would like to have some
corporate identity in it. This means that I want to decide over the
layout. So i would really prefer if ddoc were *additionaly* able to
generate a pure semantical version of the document data that is easy to
mess with an external tool. This can be a simple xml file which i can
feed into my own transformation pipline. This way ddoc does the part it
can really shine on, extracting the information, and delegates the rest
to something that knows more about the wishes of the actual user.

This shuoldn't  mean that ddoc should stop generating unified standart
documentation. But i think it is worth a thought to generate semantic
data files on request.

Gerrit