World: r3wp

This is my CRM application.  I am using LaTeX to write letters, and 
a microweb server to preview the PDFs.

I am thinking now of creating a mini LaTeX letter writing dialect.

makedoc to latex?

no, just a simple way to describe a letter format.

Like a style I guess.

papersize A4 fontsize 11 class letter
                use fancyhdr
                my-address
                consultation-date
                signature
                begin
                    provider-address
                    Dear Provider
                    patient-table
                    diagnoses&medications
                    body
                end

Isnt text supposed to do such things itself? although, we know rebol 
better, so would be easier.

text -> tex.

my-address pulls in the data from the fields in the CRM, same with 
signature etc.

Diagnoses&medications generates a LaTeX two column table.  Body is 
the text that we have written.

Tex .. need to mark up everything.  This way I avoid writing the 
markup .. Rebol will do that for me.

aah, i see, getting the data from the crm.

And yes, tex looks confusing.

Here's an example from the above layout.

\documentclass[a4paper,11pt]{letter}

%frenchspacing
\pagestyle{plain}
\usepackage{fancyhdr}

\address{Upper Hutt Health Centre\\P.O. Box 40-044\\Upper Hutt\\
\\tel: 04 920-1800\\
fax: 04 920-1808}

\date{1-Apr-2005}
\signature{Dr Graham Chiu}

\begin{document}

\begin{letter}{Dr CP ANYON\\
Ropata Village Medical Centre\\577 High Street\\
Lower Hutt, }
\opening{Dear Dr Anyon,}

\begin{quote}
\begin{tabular} {ll}
Cap. James Tiberius \textbf{Kirk} Dob: 22-Mar-2233& \\
Captain's Quarters, Starship Enterprise& \\
\end{tabular}
\end{quote}\begin{quote}
\begin{tabular} {ll}

\textbf{Diagnoses}&\textbf{Medications}\\Prolonged posttraumatic 
stress disorder&Methotrexate 12.5 mg Mondays only\\Other specified 
parasitic infections&Folic Acid 1 mg daily except Mondays\\ &Fosamax 
70 mg Tuesdays only\\
\end{tabular}
\end{quote}
James needs a new hip!
\closing{Best Regards,}

\end{letter}

\end{document}

So, this dialect will only deal with the LaTeX letter class.

You worked as a spaceship-doctor? :)

I understand you want a preprocesor for that :)

Yeah .. I worked for Star Fleet a long time ago.

I know Robert said he would make MDP emit LaTeX but I never heard 
anymore of that project.

Any LaTex users here ?  It seems very hard to change default margins 
etc.

well, I completed my mini preprocessing dialect ... harder than I 
thought it would be.  Need to re-aquaint myself with block parsing!

Oddly, when I print to a5paper, pdflatex seems to still produce a4 
size paper ... or perhaps it's just Acrobat Reader ...

it could be Adobe Reader...there are some settings on your Reader 
for the page size

inspecting the properties using Acrobat Reader, it says it's still 
A4 size.

I must be doing something wrong in creating my tex file.

Although Acrobat displays it so that the text only occupies an A5 
part of the paper.

I am not familiar with tex..


but the fist line of your output has a word 'letter' in it...could 
that be the cause of it?

Letter is the class of document ie. it should not be specifying the 
page size.  Others in this class include article, report, book, slides. 
 It could be a problem but I don't know enough about it.

Found the problem .. pdflatex needs to be told the page size in addition 
to specifying that it is a4 or a5 etc.  On page 73 of an intro to 
LaTeX !

Such is the state of the best that our industry has to offer...

LaTeX is a macro package for TeX.  Some guy wrote pdflatex to output 
LaTeX to PDF instead of DVI.  That was for his doctoral thesis.  
Such is the nature of freeware.

Nah, it's open source ;-)

So, is pdflatex better than straight from REBOL to PDF? Or is it 
also possible to output PDF from TeX, circumventing LaTeX?

Dunno.

Is it better than straight from REBOL to PDF?  I would have to say 
yes.  make-pdf gives you ultimate control over the page, but only 
for one page ie. you know the page layout already.   It is set up 
more like a desktop design package, whereas LaTeX to PDF is much 
more in the same spirit as make-doc.

IIRC pdfmaker has some hooks for pagebreaks. gabriele has something 
which makes tables across multiple pages, and rows are keept together. 
And seems the basics are inbuild to pdfmaker. Maybe Gab can step 
in?

It would be great once these hooks have something to catch onto. 
 At the moment, I do not know of a way to flow text from one box 
to one on another page without tedious line counting.  In the meantime, 
I need professionally typeset text now ...

Grrrr... Altme lost the last paragraph I typed :(

BTW, the split-text function we worked on in the parse channel would 
be useful for counting lines.  All we need now is a hyphenation dictionary 
:)

I want to do a PDF emitter for MD2... i've just been too busy lately. 
hope to get back to this soon.

won't be very good but better than nothing.

Would you have enough time to answer a lot silly questions? I forgot 
the whole api and everything, but could do the coding.

Question: Has anybody written a log-file analyzer tool in Rebol? 
I really must say, that I have looked into a lot of those tools but 
never found a good one. All spit out some information but not the 
one I'm mostly interested in. And I just get reports but can't do 
any trend analyzes etc.

IMO it would be cool thing to provide an analyzing dialect to write 
own reports.

what log?

simple apache access log

don't think that would be hard to do...

another question, although not web related, but log related - did 
anyone do snmp parser, mrtg kind of graph display?

Yes. We have one for our own use. But not snmp implementatin. However 
the french have something for that.

ok, thanks for the pointer ... two weeks before we go into our first 
providing Billingo.com is closing, damned. And we already told customers 
they will have portal, where they can log, and see the statistics 
of their per day/month usage :-)