Peter Seibel has released the text processing code that he used when writing Practical Common Lisp to turn his homegrown TeX/Markdown-style markup into HTML and PDF.
Using CL-PDF and CL-TYPESETTING, he's able to turn something like this
* A Sample
Here is a paragraph. Here's a sentence with some \i{formatting} in
it. And another sentence.
And this is another paragraph.
into this intermediate form:
((:H1 "A Sample") (:P "Here is a paragraph. Here's a sentence with some " (:I "formatting") " in" #\Newline "it. And another sentence.") (:P "And this is another paragraph." #\Newline))
And from there it can be rendered as PDF or HTML.
You've already seen the HTML output if you clicked on the “text processing code” link above; There's also a PDF version of that page.
Seeing Peter's invoice generator makes me think it wouldn't be too difficult to create a better Blinksale that included PDF output...
Posted by jjwiseman at October 07, 2005 10:56 AM