samedi 26 juillet 2008

Midterm assessment, PDF output done

Hi !

Time is come for a little summary of this project. What I had to do:
* To write new output formats: CHM, Manpages, PDF
* To write themes: PEAR HTML theme, PHP-GTK HTML theme
* To design DBHTML implementation in PhD

Currently, I'm done with CHM output, Manpage output format (and its own PHP theme) and PEAR theme for HTML format.

PDF is almost done (probably this weekend or next week). It remains two or three weeks to work on PHP-GTK theme and to begin PhD DBHTML implementation design.



As I said, PDF is almost over and renders good. My choice was to write two PHP themes: one which generates one PDF by PHP "book" and another which generates a big PDF (almost 10000 pages ^^) with all the PHP "books".

In prime exclusiveness ^_^ the big PDF version of PHP manual or zipped PDF chunks.

By the way, my mentor just release a new PhD release: PhD 0.3.0 (branch PHD_0_2, PHP 5.2 compliant).

See ya
Rudy

vendredi 18 juillet 2008

The hardest week

Hi !

Here was the hardest GSoC week ! I wrote a big part of the PDF output and both the themes "phppdf" (each PHP manual part in a file) and "phpbigpdf" (a big PDF file with all the sections).

Examples: Installation & Configuration chapter - Full Manual

What's done:
* PDF Table of content
* URL links
* internal links
* admonition paragraphs (tips, note, example, warning ...)
* bullet-lists
* tables (not finished)
* basic stuff (font/style/color changing, auto line wrap, line jumps, auto newline, ...)

If I'm good with tables, this output may be released the next week !

See you

vendredi 11 juillet 2008

haru/pecl wrapper

Hi !

I finished the PhD Manpage output this week ! Here are the PHP manpages. Unzip them in a folder and type 'man ./[function name].3' (for example 'man ./str_replace.3'), you'll see the corresponding man page.

The future PHP 5.3 release will be bundled with these man pages and a script which will allow you just type 'manphp str_replace'.

By the way, I've filled my Google Summer of Code midterm evaluation, I'm probably near behind schedule, that's why I began the new PhD output : PDF, the hardest one !

I use the Haru PDF library with pecl/haru to generate PDF. This library didn't support neither auto line break nor auto page break and is not very easy to use because it didn't allow to add text flows like PhD. That's why I began to wrote a wrapper which is very simple to use and which do auto line break and auto page break.

An example: here is a test of "PdfWriter", my wrapping class. You can watch the output here :

Currently, the words are cut but I'll fix that.

I plan to use the format (PDFPhDFormat) to build the PDF document with PdfWriter and the theme (phppdf or something) only to specify how to chunk the manual. It seems there will be one PDF by "book" (eg a PDF for Getting Started, another one for Installation and Configuration, etc.)

Next friday, maybe a first version of the PDF output...

See ya
Rudy

vendredi 4 juillet 2008

Few improvements to do

Hi

I am in progress with the Manpage output. All the required DB5 elements are processed. I have still to improve synopsises which could appear weirdly (especially in the case of the classes description when there are several synopsises items on a same manpage).

The last thing I'll do with Manpage is to generate reference summary function pages, to view all the documented functions ranked by category.

To compare with the last week screenshot:


A bad looking one (click to enlarge or view the untruncated pdf version and look at the several synopsises which appears in different places):


I think these improvements will be over in the middle of the next week :)

See ya
Rudy