in reply to producing fancy text

It depends on your notion of "fancy" and your tolerance of dependencies.

Modern CSS can do all of this, but you'll need a browser like app to produce PDF.

Since HTML is NOT supposed to be a print format you'll end up with the same entropy like LaTeX.

I'm using Emacs org-mode to have nice markup translated to LaTeX/PDF, also for beamer presentations.

This hides the boilerplate for me, but LaTeX is not particularly fast.

But without more clarification about your requirements it's a rather fuzzy question.

Edit

And of course it has been discussed before for many times. Just search the archives.

Cheers Rolf
(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery

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Re^2: producing fancy text
by BernieC (Pilgrim) on Aug 21, 2020 at 19:28 UTC
    I looked through the archives -- looks like I couldn't guess the right search terms { sigh, story of my life }.

    It sounds like LaTex might be the "easiest" option. If you're not doing anything too crazy LaTex isn't *too* bad. And if I pound on it hard enough I can get Perl-constructs that really do hide the strangeness.

    NB: I did this kind of thing for HTML years and years ago {this long before the advent of AJAX and all the super-fancy cgi packages}. Part of my job was writing CGI programs and I put together a little meta-package to make things easier {and the HTML less broken} I don't remember quite what I had done back-then any more, but it was handy things like italic(text) button(label, what to do), etc.

    I was mostly asking in general - e.g., I have a .txt file that is, basically, a long table. I was thinking it'd be nice if I could have it be nicer to read/use version but still have a simple/flat txt file that I can easily edit. I wondered if there was some XML stuff that might do that. As I said, I think that LaTex is probably the easiest path -- it is even worse than Word in terms of idiosyncrasies, but can easily figure it out and then I can have a simple source file and let Perl just handle making it LaTeX friendly.

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      Maybe take a look at asciidoc, I found it useful some years ago.

      poj

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        True -- back then I was thinking of actually generating a PDF file directly and looking for a Perl package that might do the job. Then I learned that PDF files are basically glorified Postscript files and Postscript is basically a programming language that happens to have a lot of text and graphics handling capabilities. I was frightened off.

        A while later I asked about doing graphics and y'all pointed me at SVG, which was/is a delight and does the job I wanted perfectly. I was wondering if there was a similar package for "document-like" generation. ASciidoc looks like it is pretty much what I needed.

[reply]

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