in reply to Perl Typesetting

My profession started out with grafic design and typography is one of my passions. Now I'm working with monospaced code most of my time, and I'm often trying to link those fields in one way or another.

Considering the rational, informational aspect of visual/written communication, I think that less is more. We need only a few simple, structural elements and one most readable font family. Data structures might be POD (very sexy ;), XML (flexible), HTML (quick & dirty), you name it... To keep things straight, most of the actual visual interpretation should be left to the user. He's interested primarily in the information, not our visual style.

When you're up for individual, high quality design however, you will need specialized tools that let you do the design, not the markup (thinking of QuarkXpress, Freehand, Photoshop etc.)

Keep it straight and simple!

~Django
"Why don't we ever challenge the spherical earth theory?"

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Re: Perl Typesetting
by crenz (Priest) on Aug 30, 2002 at 04:00 UTC

    We need only a few simple, structural elements and one most readable font family.

    I agree, but these are easy things, so they should be easy to implement, right? Sometimes, they are not. See the examples I gave.

    When you're up for individual, high quality design however, you will need specialized tools that let you do the design, not the markup (thinking of QuarkXpress, Freehand, Photoshop etc.)

    However, these tools defy automatization. Sure, Photoshop has it's own scripts, but it cannot be scripted from outside, using e.g. perl. LaTeX is used a lot these days to generate documents that need to use a certain fixed layout. For example, think of generating a couple hundred PDF spec sheets for products out of a database.

    Tools like LaTeX are not suitable for one-page, "screaming ad"-like design. They are meant for designs that are reused (like in a thesis). And that is where I think we need a tool that doesn't suck.

[reply]

      For example, think of generating a couple hundred PDF spec sheets for products out of a database.

      I think XML to PDF is a good approach to that. I've done that with XSLT and FO ("Formatting Objects"), using Resin and Apaches FOP. The W3 specs for FO are exactly what you need when formatting for print, but unfortunately some essentials are not supported by the current FOP implementation. So it's still impossible to make your PDFs look really good with FOP. I don't know about the alternatives in perl, but I'd rather help improving existing tools, than trying to develop another incomplete solution from scratch.

      ~Django

      "Why don't we ever challenge the spherical earth theory?"

[reply]

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