In my orig­i­nal post about it I was re­fer­ring to Bookrest as a stylesheet ed­i­tor for rst2pdf, be­cause that's what I want­ed, a way to test style changes and see what they did.

Of course, one thing lead to an­oth­er and it's start­ing to look more like a word pro­ces­sor than any­thing else, but ... well, how about a stylesheet ed­i­tor?

Sure, you can use the "Style" tab, and ed­it at will, but that's not ex­act­ly fun for ev­ery­one.

So, let's work on one. Here's the video of the cur­rent sta­tus:

Of course, this is about 1/20th of the stylesheet ed­i­tor, but at least the di­a­log is there, and most of the re­main­ing work is wiring di­alogs, which is quick us­ing de­sign­er.

Yes, the pro­gram known so far as "my rst2pdf ed­i­tor/pre­view­er ap­pli­ca­tion" is now called Bookrest.

What's a bookrest? It's a thing you put a book on.

Why Bookrest? I hope some­day peo­ple will have books open in bookrest. Plus, it ends with "rest", which is the pre­ferred ab­bre­vi­a­tion for re­Struc­tured Tex­t.

And what's the out­line view? It's a click­able tree with the out­line of the doc­u­men­t, of course.

As usu­al, let's go to the video:

The back­ground ren­der­ing was done us­ing python's awe­some mul­ti­pro­cess­ing mod­ule.

These are the vis­i­tors of this site in the last 10 min­utes or so:

Let's see: Bel­gium, the Nether­land­s, US­A, Turkey, Brazil, Thai­land, Aus­tri­a.

I know most peo­ple are not im­pressed by this kind of thing any­more, but I am old enough to have had to buy ftp sites on CD (Re­mem­ber the In­fo­mag­ic col­lec­tion? I had like 10 of those).

In 1994 I was one of the first ten or so to have a mail ac­count in my uni­ver­si­ty ( in fac­t, since I had root, I could have been the first one ;-) and the web was a waste­land ... you could not even find porn!

So, know­ing that my blog has some sort of a fol­low­ing, even if it's a hand­ful of peo­ple and that it's close to be­ing 10 freak­ing years old, and it comes from a time when they were not even called blogs... is mak­ing me feel strange to­day.

This blog is one of the spe­cif­ic things I have done longer.

• I have been a hus­band for 4 years.

• I have been a dad for 3.

• I was ac­­tive in KDE for 4.

• My com­­pa­ny is about 2 years old

Of course there are ob­vi­ous and/or fuzzy things I have done much longer:

• I have been in­­­volved in free soft­­ware 15 years.

• I have worked with com­put­ers 18 years

• I have pro­­grammed 30 years (s­­tart­ed on pa­per, kid­s!)

• I have in­­haled and ex­haled reg­u­lar­­ly for 38 years

But a spe­cif­ic thing, I can point at and say "that's mine, I did it"? This blog is proob­a­bly my longest-lived projec­t.

I don't see my­self not hav­ing it. I see my­self not post­ing for a month or so, I do that ev­ery now and then, but not hav­ing a blog? I can't see it.

I have added things though, so it's not a stat­ic dead­end thing.

I am lov­ing screen­casts (thanks to qt-record­my­desk­top and youtube). I en­joy twit­ter and iden­ti.­ca very much.

So, this ram­bling post is just my un­fo­cused way of say­ing that what I love about hav­ing a blog is that some­one reads it. So, let's do some­thing worth blog­ging about ;-)

I am in the mid­dle of that hon­ey­moon you get start­ing a new ap­p. Ev­ery new fea­ture seems tobe just 50 lines of code away, there is no lega­cy code (in fac­t, you are cre­at­ing that lega­cy code), and you learn new tricks all the time.

So, I did a new fea­ture to­day.

A day or two ago, my ed­i­tor start­ed show­ing a yel­low bar high­light­ing the cur­rent line.

But then I though... would­n't it be more use­ful to have a sim­i­lar bar fol­low­ing you in the PDF?

That way, when you are on a giv­en line, you can im­me­di­ate­ly see where you are in the out­put. Neat, right?

Here is a video show­ing it:

Sad­ly it's not per­fec­t, and prob­a­bly nev­er will be be­cause of do­cu­tils lim­i­ta­tion­s, but it's pret­ty nice!