4. Transformation

Of course with plaintext editing systems, there must be a separate step to create the final output. A big advantage is that it takes no more work to create multiple formats: They all are automatically generated from your single plaintext source.

For example we can generate final documents from the source for this talk using the program sphinx-build....

4.1. Demonstration

• This presentation itself is written in Sphinx with source at http://bitbucket.org/gkthiruvathukal/fotl and with fairly recent formatted output at http://anh.cs.luc.edu/fotl
• http://introcs.cs.luc.edu (a work in progress for Comp 170)
• http://anh.cs.luc.edu/python/hands-on/3.1/handsonHtml (for Comp 150)

Demo the whole edit process:

• Clone the repository (typically for a new collaborator or new machine, but it can be into a separate folder on the same machine for a demo).
• Add a change to FOTL source in one repository.
• Make and view html and pdf versions.
• Commit changes to the local repository.
• Push changes to Bitbucket.
• Look in Bitbucket for the diff.
• In the second local repository, pull from Bitbucket and update.

4.2. Markdown

There are alternate systems for markup and transformation:

• http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
• http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

Note: Pandoc can also transform individual files between multiple formats, for instance translate restructured text, markdown, hmtl or latex to another one of these formats or into docx, epub, pdf, or various slide show formats like S5 or Slidy.