[lug] Typesetting Programs

[David Morris]

On Thu, Dec 12, 2002 at 01:18:26PM -0700, Tkil wrote:
> >>>>> "David" == David Morris <lists at morris-clan.net> writes:
> 
> David> I was wondering what people out there use for typesetting?
> 
> You didn't say what language(s) you're attempting to automatically
> generate documentation from.  Quite a few projects use JavaDoc for
> java, and then Doxygen for C/C++.  These can do HTML, or generate
> input files for (La)TeX etc that can then be formatted to PDF or
> print.
> 
> If you go other ways, consider DocBook, which is already a bit of a
> standard for documentation.

I am not generating documentation from a specific source,
but rather creating a tool that will gather information from
a specified source, and generate documentation on it.  As
an example, creating reports from the content of a database
or pulling specified information from input files and
creating a documentation file from it.  The core processing
code for creating the documentation is all very similar,
just the method that data is gathered is different....all I
really need is to find some set of tags I can insert into a
text stream that will then get fed into a formatting engine.

One item of note, I must be able to specify an image that
will be placed in the text (given a filename).  The most
important part is that the documentation *must* look good in
a printed format (or equivalent PDF on-screen)....this means
a serif variable-width font, pictures, lines, possible
boxes, colored fonts or lines, numbered and bulleted lists,
tables, italics, bold, headers and footers (with possible
changes by section), automatic page numbering, table of
contents, list of tables or figures, page breaks, etc.
Think MIL-STD-498 as one of several types of documents this
will be used for.

--David