RE: DIY mark-up to PDF

My best guess is that the mark-up was created here by the Windows team 2+ decades ago.

I like Python, but Java has better RPG integration so Java is Plan A.

That's 1000 unique text files per week that must be rendered.


Thanks


-----Original Message-----
From: John Yeung [mailto:gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, March 08, 2019 10:12 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: 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.