I was hosting the Web Design skills competition for Guangdong province this weekend. I went back home yesterday evening and I had limited internet access during the trip. That’s why I had to postpone this email a day.
Web Design competition for Guangdong
This week, I am searching how to typeset with HTML and CSS. I have been seeking a better workflow for writing in plaintext and generating the entire project into documents, including PDF, text documents and even spreadsheet for tabular calculation.
AsciiDoc is a good candidates to write long text documents with cross-referencing easier than markdown.
Here are some plugin findings for spreadsheets:
Roo is a gem for reading spreadsheet formats, including xls, xlsx, ods and google spreadsheet.
Handsontable displays spreadsheet data nicely in web browser.
Some essays on writing in plain text and typesetting in CSS:
Multichannel Text Processing discusses the strengths and shortcomings of Rich Text, Plain Text and Markdown.
Designing For Print With CSS by SmashingMagazine.
Can you typeset a book with CSS? by W3C.
Some tools on generation:
Pandoc — tool to convert between almost every text document formats.
DocRaptor — uses the Prince engine to convert HTML/CSS into beautiful PDF.
Vivliostyle also provides an HTML/CSS to PDF generator.
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Until next week,
Thomas Mak