Rdoc -> pdf

Ruby
1

Hi,

I found the below quoted message when searching for a pdf output
formatter for rdoc.

Any idea if there has been progress made?

Cheers,
Mariano

From: Gregory B.
Date: Thurs, Dec 15 2005 11:35 pm

On 12/15/05, Austin Z. [email protected] wrote:

The Pickaxe2 has a PDF version available for purchase from the
Pragmatic Bookshelf. On the other hand, if someone wants to make a
RDoc formatter using PDF::Writer, I’ll try to provide what assistance
I can.

Ugh. This sounds like something that may need to go into Ruport. I
hate when that happens!

Would people be interesting in being able to use rdoc formatting to
generate PDFs using Ruby Reports? If so… i’ll put it on the dogpile
of features to be added this winter when I’m working full time on
Ruport for a couple weeks.

2

I reformatted your post a tiny bit, to make it eaier to respond to…
hope you don’t mind…

On 9/28/06, Mariano K. [email protected] wrote:

Hi,

I found the below quoted message when searching for a pdf output
formatter for rdoc.

Would people be interesting in being able to use rdoc formatting to
generate PDFs using Ruby Reports? If so… i’ll put it on the dogpile
of features to be added this winter when I’m working full time on
Ruport for a couple weeks.

Wow, this is an old message! We’ve completely rewritten Ruport since
then. :slight_smile:

Any idea if there has been progress made?

We didn’t get a roaring response of Yes! to this, so it went back the
burner and actually slowly fell off the radar. At this point, we’re
all pretty much incredibly busy with other things in Ruport, so I
can’t promise that we’ll get to this feature in the forseeable future.

However, what we can offer is support for anyone interested in doing
this. I’ve used htmldoc to convert html to pdf, and it’d be cool if
we can get something more robust into Ruport.

It might be better to attack it from the HTML to PDF direction rather
than the rdoc to PDF direction, since it would be more general. (Then
one could use textile,markdown,rdoc, whatever, convert to html and
ruport could then render to PDF)

If anyone wants to take the initiative on something like that, go
ahead and catch up with us on the Ruport mailing
list(http://lists.stonecode.org/listinfo.cgi/ruport-stonecode.org) or
in #ruport on Freenode. All of our developers are currently tied
down, but we can take the time to help get the information out there
that would be needed for folks who wanted to build something like
this.

It’s a neat idea, sorry we never got around to it.

-Greg

3

Hi Gregory,

On Sep 28, 2006, at 10:15 PM, Gregory B. wrote:

I reformatted your post a tiny bit, to make it eaier to respond to…
hope you don’t mind…

Nope, not at all :wink:

Pragmatic Bookshelf. On the other hand, if someone wants to make a
of features to be added this winter when I’m working full time on
Ruport for a couple weeks.

Wow, this is an old message! We’ve completely rewritten Ruport
since then. :slight_smile:

Any idea if there has been progress made?

We didn’t get a roaring response of Yes!
Well, I would like to have the docs available as pdf for offline use
and because I never really quite got the hang of searching the html
docs efficiently.

[…]
However, what we can offer is support for anyone interested in doing
this. I’ve used htmldoc to convert html to pdf, and it’d be cool if
we can get something more robust into Ruport.
But rdoc already provides simple markup as a basis, doesn’t it? Using
html would mean to reverse engineer the semantics from a format that
is already rendered for presentation, wouldn’t it?

It might be better to attack it from the HTML to PDF direction rather
than the rdoc to PDF direction, since it would be more general. (Then
one could use textile,markdown,rdoc, whatever, convert to html and
ruport could then render to PDF)
Not quite sure that I get that. Where exactly comes textile or
markdown into the picture here?

If anyone wants to take the initiative on something like that, go
ahead and catch up with us on the Ruport mailing
list(http://lists.stonecode.org/listinfo.cgi/ruport-stonecode.org) or
in #ruport on Freenode. All of our developers are currently tied
down, but we can take the time to help get the information out there
that would be needed for folks who wanted to build something like
this.
I think I expected this to be something like a new output format for
rdoc, like xml etc. is today. Your thinking goes along the lines to
build something that works outside of rdoc in ruport, or am I missing
the point here?

Cheers,
Mariano

4

I’ve copied this discussion to the Ruport mailing list, please
continue the conversation there. We don’t generally use RubyTalk for
discussion about Ruport, both for kindness reasons and because we like
to keep an archive of the things we discuss for reference.

On 10/3/06, Mariano K. [email protected] wrote:

html would mean to reverse engineer the semantics from a format that
is already rendered for presentation, wouldn’t it?

Yeah, If RDoc had an output format that was easily traversible, or if
there was a parser that would create this. (Pure ruby object, YAML, or
even XML), then it’d be much easier. Since AFAIK it does not, it’s no
different to parse text with RDoc in it than it is text with HTML,
except that RDoc might be more simple to render. (Who knows? There
is a lot of automatic magic in RDoc that’d be tough to replicate
without giving it some thought)

It might be better to attack it from the HTML to PDF direction rather
than the rdoc to PDF direction, since it would be more general. (Then
one could use textile,markdown,rdoc, whatever, convert to html and
ruport could then render to PDF)
Not quite sure that I get that. Where exactly comes textile or
markdown into the picture here?

They each also output html. If we had an html-to-anything converter
in Ruport, we could then not worry about supporting the individual
nuances of textile,markdown,rdoc,etc

the point here?
Yep, if this existed, i’d happily support RDoc → whatever in Ruport.
YAML or XML that I could easily traverse would make it easier to
support arbitrary output formats.