Re^2: producing fancy text

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.

Comment on Re^2: producing fancy text

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Re^3: producing fancy text by poj (Abbot) on Aug 22, 2020 at 09:14 UTC
Maybe take a look at asciidoc, I found it useful some years ago. poj	[reply]
Re^3: producing fancy text by LanX (Saint) on Aug 21, 2020 at 21:19 UTC
I looked into the archives for pdf creation and stopped searching in January this year: Perl to generate PDF From a certain BernieC Cheers Rolf _{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :) Wikisyntax for the Monastery}	[reply]
Re^4: producing fancy text by BernieC (Pilgrim) on Aug 24, 2020 at 02:31 UTC
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]
Re^5: producing fancy text by LanX (Saint) on Aug 24, 2020 at 14:21 UTC
> AsciiDoc looks like it is pretty much what I needed. Looks a lot like MarkDown or ORG-mode and print formats like PS or PDF are actually created via LaTeX. Please note that all these concepts of abstracting away easy LaTeX syntax won't liberate you from installing TeX configuring special LaTeX features when needed embedding more complex LaTeX (like formulas) when needed Cheers Rolf _{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :) Wikisyntax for the Monastery}	[reply]