# \[ANN\] Gerbil 0.0.0 - a document generator **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [December 10, 2007, 7:47am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ann-gerbil-0-0-0-a-document-generator/122621 "2007-12-10T07:47:51Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![snk](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/d9b06d/32.png) [@snk](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/snk)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2007, 7:47am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ann-gerbil-0-0-0-a-document-generator/122621/1 "2007-12-10T07:47:51Z")
Dear developers, technical writers, and documentation gurus, I am proud to announce a new project of mine named “Gerbil” which is beautifully short (176 lines of code) and powerful! ``` http://gerbil.rubyforge.org/guide.html ``` Personally, I am baffled at the amount of documentation I wrote (and felt was necessary) to explain the plethora of things this tiny little utility does. About 70% of the development time was consumed by documentation alone! I’m glad that’s over. 🙂 The release notes are shown at the bottom of this message. Cheers! # What is Gerbil? Gerbil is an extensible document generator based on eRuby that outputs to any format you want: plain text, HTML, LaTeX, UNIX man page, your own custom format, and so on. Gerbil is lighter and more flexible than DocBook, Deplate, and SiSU because it is small, fast, and lets you define your own custom format. Furthermore, Gerbil is scriptable unlike raw text generators such as AsciiDoc, txt2tags, and Grutatxt because it lets you inject Ruby code directly into your documents for advanced data processing and dynamic document manipulation. Gerbil is open-source software (see Section 1.2: License) so feel free to contribute your improvements and discuss your ideas in the project mailing list. 1.1 Features • Composed of less than 200 lines of code! • Lets you define your own document format. • Supports any text-based output format. • Generates a table of contents automatically. 1.2 License Copyright 2006 Suraj N. Kurapati Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: • All copies and substantial portions of the Software (the “Derivatives”) and their corresponding machine-readable source code (the “Code”) must include the above copyright notice and this permission notice. • Upon distribution, the Derivatives must be accompanied either by the Code or—provided that the Code is obtainable for no more than the cost of distribution plus a nominal fee—by information on how to obtain the Code. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. # Version 0.0.0 This is the first release of the Gerbil project. Happy birthday! Please note that although the user guide says you can install Gerbil via RubyGems, currently there is a bug in RubyGems 0.9.5 that prevents me from creating generating an installable gem without strictly adhering to RubyGems convention of putting executable programs inside a bin/ directory. Until this issue is resolved, please download the regular tarball/zip packages instead. ---
**Author:** ![snk](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/d9b06d/32.png) [@snk](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/snk)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2007, 7:11pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ann-gerbil-0-0-0-a-document-generator/122621/2 "2007-12-12T19:11:39Z")
On Dec 9, 2007, at 11:48 PM, Suraj K. wrote: > About 70% of the development time > was consumed by documentation alone! just guessing - but maybe that’s because it’s a insanely complete and nice looking bit of documentation? 😉 looks like a great project. thanks. a @ [http://codeforpeople.com/](http://codeforpeople.com/) ---
**Author:** ![snk](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/d9b06d/32.png) [@snk](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/snk)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2007, 10:10pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ann-gerbil-0-0-0-a-document-generator/122621/3 "2007-12-12T22:10:22Z")
On Dec 10, 2007 5:31 PM, ara.t.howard [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > a @ [http://codeforpeople.com/](http://codeforpeople.com/) I second that, it looks so nice! I actually felt like printing it, because it’s just so well-thought typographically. Kudos for the project. Even if it weren’t great by itself, I’d feel good just looking at the manual. ---
**Author:** ![snk](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/d9b06d/32.png) [@snk](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/snk)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2007, 10:21pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ann-gerbil-0-0-0-a-document-generator/122621/4 "2007-12-12T22:21:00Z")
On Dec 11, 10:28 am, Vitor P. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > just looking at the manual. > > – > Vitor P. (dodecaphonic) > ------------------------------------[http://twitter.com/dodecaphonic](http://twitter.com/dodecaphonic) Please do not use version 0.0.0 since gem searches for a gem version greater than 0. ---
**Author:** ![snk](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/d9b06d/32.png) [@snk](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/snk)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2007, 6:31am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ann-gerbil-0-0-0-a-document-generator/122621/5 "2007-12-13T06:31:59Z")
On Dec 10, 2007 12:18 PM, Suraj K. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > Dear developers, technical writers, and documentation gurus, > > I am proud to announce a new project of mine named “Gerbil” > which is beautifully short (176 lines of code) and powerful! > > ``` > http://gerbil.rubyforge.org/guide.html > > ``` Very nice work indeed! martin ---
**Author:** ![snk](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/d9b06d/32.png) [@snk](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/snk)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2007, 4:50am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ann-gerbil-0-0-0-a-document-generator/122621/6 "2007-12-13T04:50:52Z")
Vitor P. wrote: > I second that, it looks so nice! I actually felt like > printing it, because it’s just so well-thought typographically. That visual design (whitespace is key!) is actually the result of two years of evolution: Having used LaTeX for research papers in college, I grew fond of the stylized headings and careful use of whitespace. I began to mimic these ideas in the HTML/CSS world through my projects (user manuals and blogs mainly) and, fast forward to now, this is what we get. Nothing compares the brilliant typography of Knuth’s TeX, though. > Kudos for the project. Even if it weren’t great by itself, > I’d feel good just looking at the manual. Wow, that just made my day! 🙂 Thank you for the kind words. ---
**Author:** ![snk](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/d9b06d/32.png) [@snk](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/snk)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2007, 7:12am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ann-gerbil-0-0-0-a-document-generator/122621/7 "2007-12-13T07:12:22Z")
On 13 Dec 2007, at 12:50, Suraj K. wrote: > we get. > > Nothing compares the brilliant typography of Knuth’s TeX, though. Any eta for the LaTeX format specification? This looks really cool and I want to try writing a paper using it! Alex G. Bioinformatics Center Kyoto University ---
**Author:** ![snk](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/d9b06d/32.png) [@snk](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/snk)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2007, 6:03pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ann-gerbil-0-0-0-a-document-generator/122621/8 "2007-12-13T18:03:41Z")
Alex G. wrote: > Any eta for the LaTeX format specification? This looks really cool and > I want to try writing a paper using it! My current priority is to iron out the bugs & nuances in the HTML format. I’ll start on the LaTeX format next week, but really It’s not that difficult. I’d be surprised if it took more than 1-2 afternoons to implement. Refinement, on the other hand, can take longer. What I mean is, the mapping of most LaTeX environments to Gerbil nodes should be very straightforward. But deciding what kind of markup to use for mapping bold, underline, emphasis, tables, image-embedding, etc. is a more controversial matter. I’ll probably stick to a Textile-like markup, or maybe just give up and throw the problem at the user and have them insert these things manually. On the other hand, Gerbil is an open-source project, so feel free to start working on the LaTeX format spec file. We can talk more about this on the project mailing list [1], if you would like. Cheers! [1] [http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/gerbil-talk](http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/gerbil-talk) ---
**Author:** ![snk](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/d9b06d/32.png) [@snk](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/snk)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2007, 8:40am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ann-gerbil-0-0-0-a-document-generator/122621/9 "2007-12-14T08:40:13Z")
Bernard K. wrote: > Please do not use version 0.0.0 since gem searches for a gem version > greater than 0. I tried creating a gem with version ‘0.0.1’ and the same problem[1] occurred. This is indeed a real bug in RubyGems 0.9.5, but thankfully Eric H. just fixed it today. [1] [http://rubyforge.org/tracker/?func=detail&atid=575&aid=16202&group\_id=126](http://rubyforge.org/tracker/?func=detail&atid=575&aid=16202&group_id=126)