Be­cause it's prob­a­bly nev­er go­ing to work, but if it does, I can point out how ug­ly it was at first ;-)

It's the sec­ond com­ing of the Toshi­ba Li­bret­to, on­ly this time it's:

1. Cheap­­er

2. Filled with Lin­ux good­­ness.

It's the Asus eee. And the de­fault UI is some sort of weirdized KDE. And it is go­ing to sell a whole lot.

Re­al­ly, lug­ging my cur­rent note­book is tir­ing, not hav­ing my own tools when I go to a cus­tomer's is an­noy­ing. This ba­by should fix that.

Sure, you Word/Ex­cel/Pow­er­point jock­eys are go­ing to be an­noyed with a 800x600 screen, but it's awe­some for ssh ses­sion­s.

Yup. Fig­ured out colum­n/­cell spans in re­port­lab, found old rst2rst code that reg­u­lar­izes the ta­ble row/­columns to be all the same num­ber of el­e­ments, and voilá, ta­bles work, in­clud­ing ex­am­ples like this:

+---------------------------------+
| header                          |
+==========+======================+
|          |    tr                |
+  tl      +------------+---------+
|          |    c       |  br     |
+----------+------------+         +
|           bl          |         |
+-----------------------+---------+

Which gen­er­ates nice­ly on PDF now. See it

The bad side is that it's now not a sin­gle file any­more, so I am need­ing a place to host SVN and what­ev­er, be­cause it's turn­ing in­to a re­al projec­t... and google­code does­n't let me start more stuff.

Re­al­ly. I al­ready have a func­tion­ing slideshow pro­gram, a spread­sheet and I could write a word pro­ces­sor in a week (for some val­ues of "word", "pro­ces­sor", "write", "week" and "a".)

Of course it would be a very aw­ful of­fice suit­e, but at least it would be small. I think I can put all that in 1MB in­clud­ing icon­s.

I could make stupid­sheet pret­ty good, and to­bo­gan is ac­tu­al­ly use­ful (if rough).

I did a lit­tle (very lit­tle) more work on rst2pdf [1]

Bet­ter:

• Head­­ers

• Foot­ers

• Foot­notes (as end­notes, re­al foot­notes are too much work be­­cause you have to re­flow the tex­t)

• Ex­ter­­nal links (http, email)

• Some styling im­prove­­ments (mean­ing: the out­­put is not so painful in the eye­­s)

• Pa­per size sup­­port

• Re­al sep­a­ra­­tors

Then there are some things you just get be­cause it's done us­ing re­port­lab:

• True­­Type font em­bed­d­ing (check the ex­am­­ple be­low, and look at the monospaced font)

• No hy­phen­a­tion (although there is a project on the web that claims to have done it, I should check it out)

Still bro­ken:

• No way to put things like page num­bers or sec­­tion names in head­­er­s/­­foot­ers

• The foot­notes are not linked to their con­­tents and vicev­er­sa

• In fac­t, no in­­ter­­nal links work, in­­­clud­ing ti­­tle re­f­er­ences

• Ta­bles are pret­­ty bro­ken

And here is the usu­al ver­sion of the rst de­mo show­ing im­prove­ments.