Re: DIY mark-up to PDF

On Fri, Mar 8, 2019 at 10:26 AM Justin Taylor <JUSTIN@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I have text files that contain a DIY mark-up that I need to convert into PDF files.

Fascinating. Who came up with this markup? I don't personally work
with PDF files (yet) but it just *feels* like there must be some
well-established markup system that is easy enough to learn and use,
and already has tools for conversion to PDF (or whatever else).

I'm afraid I'm going to have to build the PDF by hand, but I figured I'd throw this out there in the hope that someone can offer a better alternative.

There's by hand, and then there's by hand. What you've described
sounds like you will write a parser/translator, where the input is
this funky DIY markup, and the output is... Java code which uses
PDFBox?

It's not a bad plan. Obviously I would use Python instead, both for
the parsing and the PDF generation, but if you're already comfortable
with Java, there's no reason not to use Java.

This will be part of a real-time process running in RPG, with a transaction rate of about 1000/week.

A thousand new markup documents each week? Or is there some small
number of templates, which will then be filled/merged a thousand times
per week?

Sounds like a fun project, in any case. :)

John Y.