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Yay! sphinx-rst2pdf-builder works!

Ok, it kin­da works a lit­tle.

I got com­mit rights in the mer­cu­ri­al re­po, so now you can get the very very al­pha ver­sion here.

This trig­gered sev­er­al bugs in rst2pdf, so you need SVN rst2pdf for it to work.

What work­s:

  • Glos­sary

  • Plain re­struc­­tured text ... with some caveats (ex­am­­ple: foot­notes are semi-bro­ken)

  • In­­dex gen­er­a­­tion (not 100%, but maybe 75%)

I don't know what oth­er pieces of sphinx re­quire spe­cif­ic rst2pdf sup­port, but I will be hit­ting them as they come.

rst2pdf: almost sphinx-ready

Some guys at PyAr are trans­lat­ing the python tu­to­ri­al to span­ish.

That tu­to­ri­al, like all the new python doc­s, us­es sphinx.

Since sphinx is very pop­u­lar, I want rst2pdf to work as well as pos­si­ble as Sphinx's PDF pro­duc­er. So, two dif­fer­ent things itch­ing, I start­ed scratch­ing.

Well, progress has been made. While the sphinx changes cur­rent­ly re­side on­ly on my com­put­er, I will pub­lish them soon, and the rst2pdf changes are al­ready com­mit­ted.

Here's a sam­ple to whet your ap­petite.

Snow Crash

Cover for Snow Crash

Review:

This was a re-read, and luck­i­ly I had for­got­ten enough to make it fun.

In fac­t, I have read ev­ery­thing Neal Stephen­son wrote, and the man can make any­thing en­ter­tain­ing.

I know this is some kind of heresy, but the be­gin­ning (the fa­mous de­liv­er­a­tor piece) is per­haps the weak­est part of the book. It shows Stephen­son try­ing to sound like Gib­son and (the worst part) achiev­ing it.

The au­thor has a much more pow­er­ful voice, is a much bet­ter writer, and in gen­er­al, his books are su­pe­ri­or (IMHO) so that freaked me out.

Of course, af­ter this book he wrote Crypto­nomi­con and The Baroque Cy­cle and Anath­em, which are 3 (or 5) of my favourite book­s, so I don't care about his mis­guid­ed youth­ful en­er­gy.


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