Redd Vinylene wrote: > Too true, too true. LaTeX gives me a headache. > > On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 1:11 PM, Martin DeMello <martindemello / gmail.com>wrote: > >> On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 3:32 PM, Redd Vinylene <reddvinylene / gmail.com> >> wrote: >>> Does anybody use this stuff as an alternative to LaTeX? >> I have a project that generates lout from ruby and then pdf from lout >> - I've been meaning to port it over to prawn and drop the external >> dependency. In general, I'd say that if you are machine-generating a >> PDF, a ruby library would be a lot more convenient to use than >> generating latex or lout or whatever. >> >> martin >> >> > > While we're on the subject of PDFs, LaTeX, etc. 1. I use an open-source document writing tool called LyX (http://www.lyx.org) to do nearly all of my documentation. It can convert to and from almost any format that has an open-source library, but its "core" is LaTeX and "pdflatex". Its internal format looks a lot like LaTeX. The primary scripting language in LyX is Python. Sorry, guys, the snakes just got there first. :) There is also an excellent package for doing "literate programming" with LyX in the R programming language at http://cran.fhcrc.org/contrib/extra/lyx/ I would like to be able to do literate programming with LyX as easily in Ruby as I can in R or Python. 2. New features for Prawn aka PDF::Document? The PDF format includes the ability to incorporate multimedia files "seamlessly" into a document. One extremely impressive example of this is a format called "U3D". This allows you to incorporate a 3D object in a PDF with very little space cost, and you can rotate the object, change the lighting on it, etc. There's a stunning example of the capabilities of this at http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/Laurana.pdf And the code to make it is at http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/Laurana_tex.zip I'm sure the tools in PDF::Document can easily get a U3D into a PDF, or if not, could be extended to do so easily. But what I'd really like is a set of Ruby libraries / classes for making the U3Ds from data! Right now, it looks like the main open source package for making U3Ds is Meshlab, which is at http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/ See also http://vcg.sourceforge.net/ -- M. Edward (Ed) Borasky I've never met a happy clam. In fact, most of them were pretty steamed.