On Mon, 8 Apr 2002, Randy Kramer wrote:
> > Michael Holt wrote:
> > > I do have
> > > another question; I've read books that say they've were written using vi
> > > and I started wondering if you could actually apply fonts and control size
> > > of fonts as well as italics, bold, etc. Is that possible? Does vi have
> > > something built in that will allow you to format a document?
>
> AFAIK (and like J. Craig Woods said) there is nothing built into vi to
> let you do those kind of things. I can imagine that someone who writes
> a book in vi uses one of two approaches (or a combination of the two):
>
Not built in, true, but I do almost all my documentation in vi/TeX. One
nice thing about vi is that you can filter sections of text through
external programs, or read directly from the stdout of any program. This
allows me to format a section of text by doing (trivial example):
:10,50! fmt
For TeX code I've created a bunch of little helper scripts to do things
like plug in an image or format columns. E.g.:
#/bin/sh
# epsinsert
GEOMETRY=`grep -A1 "% Image geometry" $1|tail -1`
# echo $GEOMETRY
WIDTH=`echo $GEOMETRY|cut -d' ' -f1`
HEIGHT=`echo $GEOMETRY|cut -d' ' -f2`
echo \\begin\{figure\}[label]
echo \\centering
echo \\includegraphics[height=${HEIGHT}pt,width=${WIDTH}pt]{$1}
echo \\caption\{ CAPTION \}
echo \\label\{label\}
echo \\end\{figure\}
This can be called with:
:r! epsinsert images/somefile.eps
> * Use vi to write the book in plain ASCII text, then move the plain
> ASCII text to another application to apply fancy formatting. (I often
> found this a useful approach even in a word processor, at least until I
> learned to use styles effectively. Content is the most important thing,
> after you get the content right, then do the formatting, hopefully to
> enhance the meaning and readability of the document.)
>
> * Use vi to write the book in plain ASCII but add tags (manually or
> semi-automatically using macros or whatever) to support a markup
> language like DocBook, LinuxDoc, HTML, LaTeX, or whatever. You know the
> tags I mean, things like:
Apache has a TeX plugin that allows you to server TeX documents over
HTML. I've been experimenting with it to show equations and it seems
promising.
>
> To me, this is not a fun approach.
>
> Randy Kramer
>
>
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