Pragmatism in the real world
Currently, I create presentations using rst2pdf and so I regularly have vim open side by side with the Preview app showing the rendered PDF. I use a Makefile to create the PDF from the rst sources, so I just use :make in vim to rebuild the PDF file and then had to switch to Preview in order for it to reload the updated PDF file. Recently a friend wondered why the PDF viewer couldn't reload… continue reading.
I currently use rst2pdf to create presentations slide decks from reStructured Text files. I like rST a lot as it's more expressive than Markdown and allows for extension. Tables in rST are marked up like this: +———–+———–+———–+ | Heading 1 | Heading 2 | Heading 3 | +===========+===========+===========+ | a | b | c | | | | | | aa | | | +———–+———–+———–+ | d | e | f | +———–+———–+———–+ | g… continue reading.
I use rst2pdf to create my presentations and noticed that the syntax highlighter wasn't highlighting instanceof. rst2pdf uses pygments for syntax highlighting, so I wondered what was going on. A short investigation led to me realise that the current stable version of pigments is 1.6 and they are working on 2.0. It seems that 2.0 has a number of changes to the PHP lexer, which aren't in 1.6. While I'm waiting, I modified my local… continue reading.
I'm currently writing some documentation in Restructured Text that I'm targeting at HTML and PDF using rst2html and rst2pdf. For syntax highlighting, both rst2html and rst2pdf use Pygments, however rst2html doesn't support any Pygments options. So a typical PHP snippet in rst targeting rst2pdf, would be written as: .. code-block: php :startinline: true $this = str_replace('foo', 'bar', $that); The startinline Pygments option is to allow it to highlight the snippet, even though the opening <?php… continue reading.
I wanted to use Helvetica Light in a PDF that I'm creating using rst2pdf and this proved a little tricker than I expected. Note that to use fonts with rst2pdf, you need to install fontconfig using brew: brew install fontconfig Now, on to the problem! In this case, I discovered that setting stdFont: Helvetica-Light or stdFont: HelveticaLight in the style file resulted in Verdana being used in the PDF file! Fortunately, the -v switch to… continue reading.
