Project idea: Ruby Press

Ruby
1

It seems to be cool idea if somebody with strong experience of printing
and
press would code his experience in Ruby, to have pretty DSL for making
“book-like” and “newspaper-like” printing.

I have in mind something like

my_book = book “My Book” do
page_size ‘A4’
units ‘cm’
type :brochure

section “Title Page” do
margin 0
columns 1

section "Title" do
  padding :top => 20
  font "Lucida", "36pt"
  align :center
end

section "Author" do
  font "Times New Roman", "20pt"
  align :right
end

end

section “Plain Pages” do
margin [1, 1, 0.5, 0.5]

font 'Georgia', '12pt'

columns 2, :space => 0.5

header do
  text_template self.number
  text_align :right
end
#hm... lots of other cool stuff?

end
end

my_book.render_pdf “mybook.pdf” {
“Title Page” => {
“Title” => “It’s my book!”,
“Author” => “It’s me”
},

“Plain Pages” => File.read(“mybook.txt”)
}

It can all look strange (as well as my English)…

The main idea is:

  • DSL, which would be natural for press (headers and footers, columns,
    and
    other things, if you know…)
  • Under it, press-print experience coded accurately.
  • Special efforts for correct images and tables printing…

What do you think? Am I reinventing TeX?

V.

2

On Fri, Jun 08, 2007 at 04:22:37PM +0900, Victor Zverok S. wrote:

It seems to be cool idea if somebody with strong experience of printing and
press would code his experience in Ruby, to have pretty DSL for making
“book-like” and “newspaper-like” printing.
[…]
What do you think? Am I reinventing TeX?

Yes, that’s what I think :slight_smile:

That said, it’s plausible that a Ruby DSL frontend to TeX (or, more
likely,
LaTeX) would be useful to someone, in much the same way that RJS is a
frontend to (Prototype-/Scriptaculous-backed) JavaScript. I think it
would
be a terrible waste to reimplement all the well-tuned, well-tested, and
pretty much bug-free typesetting/flowing/layout TeX/LaTeX provides.

You might also want to look into rtex
http://rubyforge.org/projects/rtex.
It isn’t quite what you’re talking about, but a layer of helper methods
on
top of it might suit your needs.

V.
–Greg

3

On 08/06/07, Gregory S. [email protected] wrote:

LaTeX) would be useful to someone, in much the same way that RJS is a
frontend to (Prototype-/Scriptaculous-backed) JavaScript. I think it would
be a terrible waste to reimplement all the well-tuned, well-tested, and
pretty much bug-free typesetting/flowing/layout TeX/LaTeX provides.

You might also want to look into rtex http://rubyforge.org/projects/rtex.
It isn’t quite what you’re talking about, but a layer of helper methods on
top of it might suit your needs.

V.
–Greg

You could build something on PDF::Writer. There already is a simple
markup language with the Ruby based parser that generates all it’s
documentation.

Farrle

4

On Fri, Jun 08, 2007 at 04:22:37PM +0900, Victor Zverok S. wrote:

It seems to be cool idea if somebody with strong experience of printing and
press would code his experience in Ruby, to have pretty DSL for making
“book-like” and “newspaper-like” printing.
[…]

Sounds like it might be a good idea …

I wrote a very simple book-generating program (in Python) using my
xtopdf toolkit. Its called
PDFBook.py and is part of the xtopdf package. xtopdf in turn uses the
open source ReportLab toolkit, which is pretty good, IMO. So is
PDF::Writer.

xtopdf info and software is here:

http://www.dancingbison.com/products.html

The ReportLab toolkit is here:

http://www.reportlab.org

Vasudev Ram

5

I started something like that that was basically a Ruby DSL to Docbook
using Builder + convenience methods. I called it Rockbook…

I think I still have the code around somewhere.

–Jeremy

On 6/8/07, Victor Zverok S. [email protected] wrote:

section "Author" do
columns 2, :space => 0.5

“Title Page” => {
The main idea is:

–
http://www.jeremymcanally.com/

My free Ruby e-book:
http://www.humblelittlerubybook.com/book/

My blogs:

http://www.rubyinpractice.com/

6

Hi –

On Fri, 8 Jun 2007, Gregory S. wrote:

LaTeX) would be useful to someone, in much the same way that RJS is a
frontend to (Prototype-/Scriptaculous-backed) JavaScript. I think it would
be a terrible waste to reimplement all the well-tuned, well-tested, and
pretty much bug-free typesetting/flowing/layout TeX/LaTeX provides.

I once toyed with the idea of a Ruby DVI writer. I didn’t get
anywhere with it, but it might still be a good idea.

David

7

On 6/8/07, Gregory S. [email protected] wrote:

That said, it’s plausible that a Ruby DSL frontend to TeX (or, more likely,
LaTeX) would be useful to someone, in much the same way that RJS is a
frontend to (Prototype-/Scriptaculous-backed) JavaScript. I think it would
be a terrible waste to reimplement all the well-tuned, well-tested, and
pretty much bug-free typesetting/flowing/layout TeX/LaTeX provides.

I’ve had good experiences using ruby to generate lout - it’s more
pleasant to work with than {la,}tex since machine generation was one
of its design goals.

martin