A diary of mundane work carried on the the Shrob review. This will include technical work on the scripts, as well as writing and compilation work.
Working on the chat script which should allow me to manage the paper easily. adding compilation of text files to html and web pages. I can now create a web-page at www.shrob.org by generating from a plain-text file. This is a useful first step. Now I would like to create a simple home page for the newspaper at www.shrob.org/index.html and introduce the paper to any random visitor. Once I have done that I need to start working on the nomlang script www.nomlang.org/eg/paper.tolatex.pss This is somewhat tricker than just creating a webpage, because I need to actually generate a layout in pdf with graphics, author, date and multiple columns. My idea is to make the layout “automatic” based on the number of columns and number or words and graphics. But I don’t actually know if this is practical.
I am trying to make a script called www.nomlang.org/eg/chat.thepaper.pss whose purpose is to maintain the newsletter. Some of the tasks that this script carries out are, uploading and downloading files to a server, editing files, maintaining the website associated with the shrob newsletter www.shrob.org . Generating (static) webpages from text files using a script like www.nomlang.org/eg/text.tohtml.pss and actually creating the PDF shrob newsletter with a script like www.nomlang.org/eg/paper.tolatex.pss .
My current idea is to have a single text file called, for example
/edition.1/shrob.ed1.txt which will contain all the content from the
newsletter organised in a format which can be “layed out” into a
multicolumn PDF newsletter with images, and diagrams.
The files ending in “.pss” are nom scripts which is a language for parsing and translating simple text formats. More info is at www.nomlang.org.
I have started writing a few scripts to assist in maintaining
a small, humble newsletter in Hobart, Tasmania. What is the
difference between a journal and a blog? A journal is just a
“shopping list” of things done or to do, whereas a blog is supposed
to be profound and carefully composed thoughts of considerable
worthiness. This is a journal. I may also keep a blog at
/post/index.html about more significant developments.
html formatted by nom
comments/suggestions to: mjb <at> nomlang.org