On 07/11/11 12:08, Dag Wieers wrote:
On Sat, 5 Nov 2011, Stuart Rackham wrote:
On 05/11/11 09:38, Lex Trotman wrote:
On 5 November 2011 06:53, Stuart Rackham<[email protected]> wrote:
Putting this in the odt conf file should hopefully eliminate the need for the
line_break.py filter:
[miscellaneous]
subsverbatim=specialcharacters,callouts,replacements3
[replacements3]
(\n|$)=<text:line-break/>\n
\s=<text:s/>
The downside to this last one is that 20 spaces are replaced by 180 characters,
while doing <text:s text:c="20"/> would be better. But I can see how that would
be more difficult to produce.
It was never going to be pretty to read but if there is a real performance
impact you could first replace in tab sized chunks and then fall back to single
characters:
[replacements3]
(\n|$)=<text:line-break/>\n
\s{8}=<text:s text:c="8"/>
(?<!<text:s)\s=<text:s/>
The progress to date on the ODF backend is impressive, converting to ODF is a
complex business, what I'm not clear on though are the benefits. From what
I've read it seems to come down to finding a less complex way of styling PDF
output than FOP offers, I'm just not convinced that the cure isn't worse than
the disease.
Well, I have to add that in the first 4 hours (doing the ODF back-end) I was
able to do what I couldn't properly do that past 3 years using other back-ends.
That in itself proves to me that this is a viable alternative (for people with
my skills at least).
Also, not just styling and formatting is important to me, for my work I need to
be able to produce (styled) Word and ODF documents too. So it's not just about
producing PDF output (only).
If this is the goal then wkhtmltopdf offers a much more straight-forward
solution
(http://groups.google.com/group/asciidoc/browse_thread/thread/94196f780ca3ad46):
- You only have to style once for HTML and PDF outputs.
- You style using familiar CSS stylesheets.
- You can use existing AsciiDoc themes.
- The wkhtmltopdf backend processor is fast, relatively light weight, and
doesn't require a GUI to work.
- wkhtmltopdf has pre-built binaries for both Windows and Linux.
I looked at it, but there's no webkit and wkhtmltopdf that works on RHEL/CentOS.
I tried to produce RPMs but there are simply too many dependencies. Besides, it
lacks Word and ODF document support ;-)
This weekend I did a presentation about asciidoc-odf, and 3 weeks ago I
mentioned the project at the LibreOffice conference in Paris and at both
ocassions there is a lot of interest of people that need to produce ODF/DOC
documents but don't want to have the hassle of using GUI programs.
In fact, this weekend people were interested in using AsciiDoc to produce
reporting in ODF output as doing it manually was proven too hard.
I understand that AsciiDoc was never intended for a back-end with different
restraints, but I am confident that we don't need that much infrastructural
changes (to asciidoc) to create something that is useful to 95% of future
asciidoc-odf users.
And even the nesting may be worked around (eg. nesting a paragraph in an 'empty'
list-heading that can be nested inside a paragraph). I know it sounds awful but
at least we can style this exactly as we like it.
I hope we can get it to the point where we can include ODF support with AsciiDoc
by default, and I hope we can get your support too ;-)
I've just committed Lex's a2x backend extensions so we're getting there.
At it's core asciidoc is a tool for generating HTML and DocBook output and in my
opinion it already has to many backends in the distribution (my primary
motivation for the recent plugins, themes and filters support).
So, for now, I would like to keep ODF support bundled as an external plugin. The
complexity of the ODF backend makes it a great use case for the plugin architecture.
Cheers, Stuart
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"asciidoc" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/asciidoc?hl=en.
