On Sun, Jul 02, 2017 at 09:47:08AM +0000, Dede Lamb wrote:
Yes! This is all good info. In the meantime I've been doing some experiments of my own. Python interpreter has replaced trivial math stuff that I used to do in spreadsheets.
For "trivial" math stuff, there's also bc (or dc if you want RPN) - but both are capable of a lot more than just trivial arithmetic, although i tend to use awk or perl for complex stuff (i'd rather spend time improving my skill with generic languages than math-only languages). You may also be interested in GNU octave. I use bc a lot, as well as speedcrunch if i need a semi-programmable GUI calculator with good history (of both input and results). I find simple calc apps like gcalculator to be annoyingly difficult to use **because** they work like a basic hand-held calculator so you can't see (and edit) the entire calculation you're entering before you execute it.
When I need to produce documents I write them in markdown, convert them to html using pandoc and then convert that to pdf using wkhtmltopdf. I style the html document using css which is the easiest way i know of to apply styles, very little code is required to get something fairly snappy looking.
You can do that in one step if you want. pandoc knows how to use wkhtmltopdf - it's one of the two options for generating PDF (the other is via latex). e.g from a Makefile in one of my document directories: $(BOOKNAME).pdf: $(TITLE) $(CHAPTERS) $(CSS) Makefile pandoc -r markdown -w pdf -t html5 --css $(CSS) -o $@ $(TITLE) $(CHAPTERS) The '-w pdf' combined with '-t html5' tells pandoc to generate a PDF by first generating html5 and then processing it with wkhtmltopdf. The same Makefile also has similar rules for producing epub and html output. Multiple output formats from the same source file(s). The epub and html rules use slightly different CSS files. wkhtmltopdf has some oddities and bugs but is mostly good enough for most things. getting page breaks exactly where you want them can be a real PITA. OTOH, I do know HTML & CSS fairly well, so it's easier for me to work with than latex. BTW, one of the things I **really** like about using plain text formats for writing is that it works perfectly with git, so I get to use the exact same revision control tools for documentation and other writing as I do for programming. ".md" and ".css" files are source code, just like ".c" or ".pl" or whatever. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>