Hi list,

I am about to hand in a report for an educational programming project
and am looking for a smart and easy way to typeset it and the ruby
code for the appendix. I think others must have done similar things
and would be grateful to hear about you personal experiences and
opinions.

The report is ~10 pages with the usual elements of academic writing -
abstract, sections, headings, literature references, footnotes and a
reference list. In the appendices I have ~2000 lines of ruby code
which I would like to typeset with typographic syntax highlighting,
line numbers and file names. I also want to show the applications
directory structure which I could grab with `tree`. Finally there are
some tables and images. I do not have to document the entire
application at code/API level.

I'd prefer to be able to autogenerate the report entirely so I can
make last-minute changes to the code without having to cope with
redundancy in the report. I want to stay DRY...

At the end, I want it all to be in a single pdf file ready for handing
in as a printout.


I have been looking at different markup languages and the most
relevant for writing the report seem to be textile and markdown, maybe
with markdown as the most human-readable. I could also go with a more
low-level xml format, I would then use HAML to generate it, but the
easier the better.

I have no experience with typesetting xml files with CSS for print,
but am used to typeset xhtml for on-screen presentation in web
browsers. If this is the way to go, then which tools can turn my
markdown/xml & css into a nice pdf file?

Any suggestions are most welcome!

thanks,
Siemen