Let me throw my $0.02 cents in. Rather than using whitespace to delineate those elements, for the little extra effort involved in coding it might be worthwhile to use some non-standard (for ascii that it) characters. That way you could do some consistency/error/ *whatever* checking..
Then again, perl IS made specifically for text parsing is it not? Maybe a combination of... Marc. > On Thu, Jun 07, 2001 at 06:39:22PM -0700, Robert L. Yelvington wrote: > > can anyone suggest a good package to format ascii docs to be converted > > to pdf? <snip> > > less time consuming) way to do this... > > If you adopted formatting guidelines for the ascii text (for example, one > blank line is a paragraph, two is a section, three is a chapter, text after > an underscore is underlined, etc.) it wouldn't be too hard to write a > script in Python or Perl to convert it to docbook; the docbook could then > be converted to pdf using any of several tools; alternatively there is a > Python library that can generate PDF files directly, so you could write a > Python script to generate the PDF directly from the ascii text.
