Effective D book?

H. S. Teoh hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx
Sat Jun 15 08:55:11 PDT 2013


On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 11:15:14PM -0400, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Friday, June 14, 2013 19:57:52 Walter Bright wrote:
> > > Interestingly enough, based on Andrei's suggestions, I'm writing
> > > it using ddoc so that it can easily be converted into latex, html,
> > > and e-book formats rather than being tied to any particular format
> > > (I was going to use latex, but Andrei thought that a macro
> > > language would be better as latex is very tied to physical print
> > > and fixed layouts). It'll probably be the first book ever to be
> > > written entirely in ddoc.
> > 
> > This is just being a win all around!
> 
> My one major complaint about using ddoc is the need for the $(P )
> macro everywhere, whereas LaTeX inserts paragraphs based on empty
> lines. I should probably create an enhancement request for that (and
> maybe even try and implement it), but I have enough to do right now
> that I decided that I'd just put up with it for now. But aside from
> the need for $(P ) macros, it's actually quite pleasant to work with.

I'm curious about how you manage to factor out / abstract away the
niggling details of LaTeX, like the use of ".\ " after an abbreviation
(to make it produce only an inter-word space, as opposed to the extra
space at the end of a sentence), m-dash vs. n-dash, etc., some of which
are quite specific to LaTeX but are quite necessary if you're going for
print-quality typesetting. And what about embedded \footnote's? Section
references? Do you have macros for all of them? Does it make it a bit
cumbersome to type?


> I do have to process the ddoc before giving it to the compiler in
> order to generate the table of contents and index macros (since you
> can't generate those with just macros), but since I'm using a D script
> to do the build, that was actually pretty easy.
[...]

Isn't \tableofcontents enough to auto-generate the table of contents? Or
are you talking about doing that for HTML output?


T

-- 
Talk is cheap. Whining is actually free. -- Lars Wirzenius


More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list