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 <SNK at GNA dot ORG> 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. -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.