Having two modes? - the basic standart one, and a flag switched one?<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On 19 October 2010 15:14, Gerrit Wichert <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:gwichert@yahoo.com">gwichert@yahoo.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">Am 17.10.2010 19:45, schrieb Walter Bright<br>
<div><div class="h5"><br>
> Apparently, it is fairly simple to convert plain text files to PDF.<br>
><br>
> <a href="http://re-factor.blogspot.com/2010/10/text-to-pdf.html" target="_blank">http://re-factor.blogspot.com/2010/10/text-to-pdf.html</a><br>
><br>
> Which suggests to me it should be equally simple to create a Ddoc<br>
> macro file to allow Ddoc to emit pdf files directly.<br>
><br>
> Anyone want a nice weekend project to product this?<br>
><br>
<br>
</div></div>I don't think that it is the best idea to produce a pdf in one step.<br>
First PDF is really complicated (and also evolves over time).<br>
Second this would require dmd to determine the layout of the generated<br>
documentation.<br>
<br>
We could easily avoid the frist point. When we just make ddoc generating<br>
xsl-fo a tool like apache fop can be used to generate pdf or html from<br>
it. This is what xsl-fo is designed for. It's not rocket science to<br>
create a xsl-fo layout. But the second problem remains. If i where a<br>
company or community writing libraries in d i would like to have some<br>
corporate identity in it. This means that I want to decide over the<br>
layout. So i would really prefer if ddoc were *additionaly* able to<br>
generate a pure semantical version of the document data that is easy to<br>
mess with an external tool. This can be a simple xml file which i can<br>
feed into my own transformation pipline. This way ddoc does the part it<br>
can really shine on, extracting the information, and delegates the rest<br>
to something that knows more about the wishes of the actual user.<br>
<br>
This shuoldn't mean that ddoc should stop generating unified standart<br>
documentation. But i think it is worth a thought to generate semantic<br>
data files on request.<br>
<font color="#888888"><br>
Gerrit<br>
</font></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>// Yours sincerely<br>// Emil 'Skeen' Madsen<br>