Ted Leung on the air: Open Source, Java, Python, and ...
I'm working on my pyblosxom presentation for PyCon, and I'm experimenting with writing my paper in ReStructured Text (ReST). The proliferation of "humane" text formats like ReST, Textile, Markdown, and the various Wiki syntaxes is enough to make me insane. I'm constantly getting confused between different Wikis and other programs. Also, all these formats creates fragmentation in tools. There's the nice HumaneText service on OS X for Markdown. Alas, no such tool for ReST. At least there's Bill Bumgarner's ReSTedit.
On the picture side, I started playing with GraphViz, which is something I've wanted to play with for quite some time. Most of the presentations that I give involve lots of graph style diagrams and/or code. PowerPoint doesn't really have good support for these kinds of presentations. GraphViz looks like a great solution for the diagram part. It's easy to make good looking diagrams (I still need to learn a little more about layout), and is less painstaking than playing with Visio or some other graphic tool. It does take me back to my grad school days of preparing papers with LaTeX. As for the code, I haven't really come upon a good (semi)automated solution for formatting code for slides, so I usually end up tweaking each slide by hand.
HOW do you pronounce "pyblosxom" ?
PIE-blaw-suh-ksum?
pih-BLOWS-ksum?
PIE-blossom?
?
Posted by Katherine at Sun Mar 6 10:45:27 2005
You copy text in your favorite format to the buffer, hit a button, and then when you paste it, it's HTML. You can use any filter that you can find an XmlRpcFilteringPipe for.
Sadly, it was made before the HTTP filtering pipe protocol. But it's cool, no?
I'm confused much of the time, why more people don't think these are cool ideas.
Posted by Lion Kimbro at Sun Mar 6 11:44:09 2005
And yes, I find ReST to be a nice format for writing PyCon proposals and papers.
Posted by Donovan Preston at Sun Mar 6 17:19:11 2005
"pie-blossom" is how I say it.
Lion:
A service that allows other services to be plugging in is cool. Twould also be cool to have such a service that piped to and fron a UNIX filter.
Donovan:
We'll see -- I already have a copy of PPT. But it looks like the paper is gonna be ReST and GraphViz/JPEG
Posted by Ted Leung at Sun Mar 6 22:21:57 2005
Reinout
Posted by Reinout van Rees at Mon Mar 7 04:37:25 2005
Why not just use s-expressions or XML? then transform the paper as required?
Even using OpenOffice is an option (as your paper in OO is just a zipped document.xml file.
These wiki/humane formats can't last much longer -they are too painful.
Posted by Stephen De Gabrielle at Tue Mar 8 22:41:14 2005
Because ReST is used widely in the Python community, and it's somthing I've been meaning to learn for that reason. I've done the transform XML thing before, and it's too time consuming -- I don't have existing stylesheets. If I wanted that, I'd go back to LaTeX.
As for OpenOffice, I'm not sufficiently motivated to try it.
Posted by Ted Leung at Wed Mar 9 00:46:42 2005
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