World: r3wp

the pdf maker is not a markup language :) it's a (rather low level) 
dialect. you generally want to hook up higher level mls to it (like 
makedoc and qml)

what is wetan then (or what was the name)? :-)

wetan is an emitter for makedoc. so the ml is still makedoc basically 
:)

first results of the typesetter: http://www.colellachiara.com/soft/PDFM2/test.pdf

Looks good.

Yep, looks good.

I don't have anything to say, so I'm just going to agree with Volker 
and Anton :-)

hmm, looked at PDF, what is special about two columns output? :-) 
Disclaimer - I know completly nothing about what typesetting is, 
so bear with me please :-)

pdf maker - you have had to specify exactly where the text went.

Now pdf-maker2 appears you to allow text to flow from one place to 
another .. which is important if you don't know how much text you 
are starting with.

the example is also showing full justification, and hyphenation which 
is new.

what we also need to see is different font styles within the columns 
of text.

while still preserving justification and hyphenation, and text flow

what is hyphenation, please? division of words at the end of line?

to insert a hyphen into a word to split the word up

eg hyphen-ation

ok, thanks :-)

graham: i'm not using a dictionary, and i'm not sure i want to do 
that in the pdf maker. i think it's more low level than that. otoh, 
doing so could provide some optimization (don't hypenate if it's 
not needed, like TeX does), so i'm not completely against it.

currently you insert soft-hypens in the dialect and the typesetter 
decides if it should use it or not.

i'm going to play with the penalties and demerits for hypens to see 
if i can get a better output; however the columns in the test are 
pretty small so it's hard to get a good ouput anyway.

hyphenation dictionaries use small tables of characters to decide 
where to put the hyphens

also notice that the columns have a different width (i think TeX 
can't do this, not easily at least)

I noticed that.

i think TeX has a very good hypenation algorithm (at least it was 
the best at the time)

Yes, I'm using it

yet it's something for higher level dialects to do imho. i.e. makedoc 
would do that.

Not sure .. I think I would want to see it at the pdf-maker level

that means the pdf maker has to be aware of the language of any paragraph 
(or part of paragraph) and so on.

localised versions :)

imagine you want to typeset a sentence in english that quotes a sentence 
in italian...

or, if i ever get to support unicode, a sentence in english that 
quotes japanese.

i want this to stay at a upper layer. :) i will have to do it anyway 
- i'll have to do the pdf emitter for qml for e.g.

(and surely the md3 one)

winansiencoding does not have ligatures - too bad, so that'll need 
to wait for when i get to unicode. :(

anyone interested in writing the user documentation for the pdf maker 
2?

sure, but it would require that I know something about pdf maker 
2, wouldn't it? :-)

do you want it to be based on the PDF Maker 1 docs?

but what will we use ?

:)

Gabriele, it's pretty cool. Good reference, too.
Does underline not work yet ?

First thing I tried of course was bold, italic and underline. Sorry, 
I'll try to stick to positive comments.

henrik, you can know by reading the developer docs. but you will 
also make examples and explain it so that knowledge of the internals 
of pdfmaker is not necessary :)

e.g. http://www.colellachiara.com/soft/PDFM2/pdf-maker.html#section-3
gives a description of the dialect that you can base the user docs 
on.

e.g. (above url) gives a description of the dialect that you can 
base the user docs on. (text was not visible in previous post)

Anton, only a few things of the text dialect are implemented. i wanted 
to get to a working version as soon as possible so that i could test 
the typesetter easily.

iirc underline is not supported directly by PDF, but the new typesetter 
could probably add that. not high pri right now (although qml will 
need it - actually, it'll need strikethrough)

bold and italic are a different font (i.e. you use Times-Italic instead 
of Times-Roman)

Gabriele,  I want to thank you for such beautifull code prentation. 
Did you release the Litterate programming tool you use for this? 
Where do I look? Thanks

not yet, there are still parts of it that are very far from complete. 
i can release the version i'm using to those brave enough to try 
it out, but i think you really need to be brave. :)

the only publicly released part for now is the emitter: http://www.colellachiara.com/soft/MD3/emitters/wetan.html