Richard Jones' Log

Oh for fucks sake:

Victorian Premier John Brumby says he probably leans towards saying that Bill Henson's controversial photographs of naked youths "crossed the line" [from art to pornography].

Speaking on radio 3AW today, Mr Brumby said he had not seen the photographs.

Anyone who has seen the one (NSFW) image from the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery exhibition available to the public (or any of his prior exhibitions, apparently) can attest that there's absolutely nothing you could describe as "sexualisation".

Bruce, the Presentation Tool is getting incrementally better. It's a nice little hobby project because there's always just a little more that could be done, and never a huge task at any given step. Thus I can do a little each time when I'm on the train (30 minutes of hacking on my EEE PC).

ReStructuredText is now the only input format - the old "Socrates"-based implementation is gone. Everything that it could do in terms of formatting may now be done in ReST - and more.

Some of the stuff I mentioned in my last post has been resolved - though it's not final I'm definitely leaning towards staying with directives as they give me more, and Bruce will be able to be more intelligent at producing HTML than the generic html4css2 writer (when dealing with Bruce presentations). Title-less pages are there, so are video pages. Titles are incorporated into the page decoration, allowing some nice tricks. Enumerated list generation handles more styles.

Next up I'll be looking at reintroducing the python interpreter and python code page types - but in the New Bruce they're actually just page elements that may form part of any page.

ps. for the people who asked to see it in action - grab the SVN and run something like "python -m bruce examples/example.rst" or any of the .rst in the examples directory. Bruce is being developed against the pyglet SVN HEAD though (it might work against 1.1, I'm not sure)

As previously hinted Bruce, the Presentation Tool may now display presentations authored in ReStructuredText. I've had a chance to do some more work on it lately, and need to take a step back and think about what I'm trying to do :)

The ReST capabilities currently available are:

1. Sections denote pages (just like all the other ReST presentation tools),
2. Lists are handled (some features missing). A lot of inline markup is handled. Images are handled, both inline and stand-alone.
3. The stylesheet and other configuration may be changed on the fly with ".. config::" directives.
4. The background decoration* may be specified with a ".. decoration::" directive.

*: the decoration stuff is new as of very recently too. Currently it controls the background colour, but also allows rendering of quads (with colour gradient if you like) and images in the background. There's still much to do like scaling the decoration layer to the screen size, and adding more toys to decorate with like lines and possibly splines. Not sure how far to take it.

Missing from the ReST side though is:

1. Pages without titles (this would require some sort of "page" directive to indicate a new page has begun).
2. Other page types like the Python interpreter, Python code and Video.
3. Handling notes and running-sheet HTML generation sensibly.
4. Allowing custom page types, perhaps through ".. custom:: <module name>"

Those things aren't insurmountable. I'm becoming increasibly convinced that ReST is a better way to go than the custom markup format, but I'm having trouble with the final decision to give up on the old format.

Of course maintaining two parsers is ... silly.

I'm pretty sure I've made my decision, but thought I'd throw this post out anyway in case anyone had any thoughts or encouragement...