[pypy-dev] Re: URGENT: pypy rest template

[Christian Tismer]

Beatrice During wrote:

referring to your email

> We are in the consortium meeting now and are discussing the deliverables 
> due in the first year.
> 
> As decided in the last consortium meeting you said you would be finished 
> with turning the deliverable template into ReST by 12 of sept....
> 
> When can you finish with this - we are waiting with wp 4 and 5 and 14 
> deliverables for this....?

and our phone call from Monday.

After all, I am asking you for help.

I tried to get something final ready with a lot of effort.
Actually, I spent much more hours on this than necessary.
The problem is that there are some open ends which are not
really clear. I planned to ask you for some assistance on
Monday, but then failed to do it. Going to do it now, to
short-cut efforts a bit, and to get a more realistic result.

Currently, I have created a couple of ReST documents, which
more or less resemble the given OOo template. I also created
OOo stub documents which are able to import some rendered HTML
versions of ReST in a half-automated way.

This is all halfway imperfect or perfect, depending on POV.
For me it is imperfect, because the problem is not well-defined.

Problem is that the template document has
a) some formatting properties which are hard or not directly
    possible to model with ReST, but I don't know how relevant
    this is and if I need to support it,
b) has no real content, so I don't know what the real problems
    will be that I have to solve for the final documents.

My problem is further to decide what to to in an automated way
and what to declare as some hand editing needed to be done on
the final document. Ideally, a single transformation would do
it all, but this is quite involved and beyond scope of the task.

You could help me very much on drawing the decisions and to come
up with a most simple solution this way:

- Please, take the existing .sxw template document as it is,
   and use it to write the piece of information you wanted to
   write. Fill in the WP related info as it should be.

- change its formatting as you see fit. Check if the regular
   sections like table of contents, listing of participants,
   and abbreviations used throughout the document are in the
   shape that we really need and want, and adjust accordingly.

- make the document a final document, regardless whether the
   content is final, but really fill it with the actual stuff,
   including all possible problems like footnotes, tables and
   cross-references which might occur, and maybe additional
   sections which are to be repeated for other documents.
   Simply *use* the framework in a typical, non-trivial way.

- replace the yet unspecified topic, deliverable, WP information
   and other systematic stuff placeholders with real information,
   and reference it in exactly the same way if it needs to be
   referenced in the document. Augment systematic information
   which might not have been foreseen, yet.

This would give me very good input to figure out what is to
be parameterized via ReST, and what is just a repeated block of text,
which I can either generate from a ReST include, or that can be
put into the template OOo document in the first place.

What I'm intending to do is to take your document, split it into
per WP/deliverable individual pieces which go into the ReST
text, and into re-used text blocks which just stay in the template,
with no or just little parameterization.
So I will generate your ReST source document from your OOo document!

I will then set up a procedure as simple as possible (but no simpler)
to produce a final PDF document from this. There may or may not be
a persistent Open Office document involved at all, I will see what
is actually needed. You will anyway get a ReST document back for
review ASAP, and we'll have a chance for some interaction on this
until we reach coherence.

Summary:
--------

You could be very helpful by just using the given template, turn
it into a real document with some content, and giving it the final
shape that you think would be appropriate. Please adjust the given
tables according to your use-case, see if the page footers and
headers are really like they should be, use the needed features
which were not used in the content-less template, so I get a feeling
about what I need to expose to the writer of the document and what
can be defined in a fixed manner, somewhere (probably in a stub).

The content of this doc does not need to be final or complete.
It would just be great if it would touch enough needed features
like formatting, footnotes, references, left/right/center alignment
of tables and text in tables, maybe including pictures, usage
of maybe numbered enumerations, and things
like column-widths of tables. I need to decide whether I can make
use of table layouts stored inside the template, or whether to
switch to the newly supported ReST table formatting,and to what
extent.

If you could focus on these matters and give me some nice doc,
early, this would be very helpful. I can send back a transliterated
version in a few hours and re-iterate the template.

Summary of Summary:
-------------------

Please make a document with the features you need and the
design you like. Feel free to redefine all the styles as seems
fit. This makes this task much easier to handle for me. Right now,
I'm blocked because I have too many open questions and unresolved
variables to become effective.

All the best  -- chris

-- 
Christian Tismer             :^)   <mailto:tismer at stackless.com>
tismerysoft GmbH             :     Have a break! Take a ride on Python's
Johannes-Niemeyer-Weg 9A     :    *Starship* http://starship.python.net/
14109 Berlin                 :     PGP key -> http://wwwkeys.pgp.net/
work +49 30 802 86 56  mobile +49 173 24 18 776  fax +49 30 80 90 57 05
PGP 0x57F3BF04       9064 F4E1 D754 C2FF 1619  305B C09C 5A3B 57F3 BF04
      whom do you want to sponsor today?   http://www.stackless.com/