New translation: Finnish

Hello Finland and Finnish readers!

Your friend Mikko J Piippo from Helsinki has translated the Sample file and the program interface (potfile) for you.

The work is already online on the documentation page.

Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) with txt2tags

You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all diferent.

If you decide to go left, turn to page 4.
If you decide to go right, turn to page 5.
If you decide to cry, do it ;)

Jokes apart, this the format of the Choose Your Own Adventure books, where the reader can decide the flow (an the end) of the story.

What if you want to make your very own CYOA book?

You could use a PDF file as the book, it has pages. As a bonus, you can also use direct links to the pages on the “turn to page 4″ excerpts, improving the user experience.

Looks cool enough? And what if I say that you can do it all in a single nice flat text file?

Eric Forgeot has written an article teaching how to transform a text file into a full CYOA book, using txt2tags. The article is itself a CYOA, check it out now: txt2CYOA : a “choose your own adventure” easily made with txt2tags.

I don’t know about you, but I’m amazed to see how creative the txt2tags users are!

New Translation: Manual Page in Chinese

Hey, China! Abby Pan has just translated the Manual Page to your language.

Abby’s work is already online on the documentation page.

Txt2tags article at Linux Magazine

If the Linux Magazine lands at your country, you’re a lucky guy. Check out the new Issue 80 from July 2007 to find a nice article fully devoted to txt2tags!

LinuxUser: Workspace: txt2tags - Write once and publish anywhere with this handy document generator. Note: There isn’t a link for the online version of the article, so I guess only the printed magazine will have it.

The man who made the article is our old time friend Dmitri Popov, who already wrote “Minimalist tools for writers” and created the excellent QuasiWiki (Txt2tags extension for OpenOffice.org).

Thanks again Dmitri!

Guide: Static sites with txt2tags

Demian Neidetcher wrote on the txt2tags site to tell us about a nice guide he has made:

I love what you guys have done. I decided to re-do my site and came across this. I did a write-up on my site that explains the process I used with txt2tags.

Check out his Static Site Creation Guide, featuring detailed tips on how to use txt2tags, m4 and make to create and maintain a full website.

Excerpts:

I have developed websites in Python (CGI and Django), PHP, Perl, .NET, Java (Struts, WebWork, Java Server Faces) and finally Ruby on Rails. However, I don’t always have the need to do a full-blown, database backed website that uses a complicated framework. Sometimes simple HTML will suffice.

Finally I can focus on content without having to resort to a WYSIWYG tool and still get nicely formatted pages.

Enjoy!

Update: Check out David’s Spanish translation for this guide.

New Translation: Manual Page in German

Michael Malien strikes again! Now he translated the Manual Page to German. You know, manpage. That thing UNIX users love to hate.

His work is already online on the documentation page.

New Translation: Writing Books in German

Hello! Just a quick post to inform you that the team grew even more:

• Michael Malien translated the Writing Books to German.
• Martin J. Ponce revised the Spanish program messages (potfile).

Their work is already online on the documentation page.

New hot document: Tips & Tricks

In txt2tags, you ever wondered how to:

• Make strike, subscript or superscript text?
• Insert the ALT text for images?
• Create a custom DIV or SPAN?
• Make a line break <BR>?
• Load extra LaTeX packages?
• Make colored code snippets?

Fear don’t. Txt2tags Tips & Tricks!

Leave a comment to share your own tip or suggest a new!

Using HTMLDOC to split HTML in multiple pages

You have that really big HTML page that takes forever to load on the browser? What about to break it in smaller pieces, one topic per page? The HTMLDOC tool can make it for you.

The main purpose of this tool is to do the opposite: join multiple HTML files into one single PDF file. It has a huge list of options, so you have strong control over the process, like setting fonts, header and footer, automatic Table of Contents, insert a cover page and more.

The txt2tags User Guide PDF is generated from a big HTML file by HTMLDOC.

The latest version comes with a new target called “htmlsep”, that takes an structured HTML page (full of <H1>, <H2>) and breaks it into multiple pages. This is the command line usage:

htmldoc -t htmlsep -o output-folder file.html

Note that it’s required that you create a folder for the generated files, before running the command. Let’s break some files? Here’s a quick sample HTML file with some headings:

<html>
<body>
<h1>Greatest Bands Ever</h1>
  <h2>Punk Rock</h2>
  RAMONES.
  <h2>Softcore</h2>
  Millencolin, No Fun At All, No Use For A Name, ...
  <h2>Other</h2>
  Toy Dolls, Operation Ivy, Face to Face, ...

<h1>Greatest Movies Ever</h1>
  <h2>Documentary</h2>
  Dogtown And Z-Boys, Riding Giants, Step Into Liquid, ...
  <h2>Strange</h2>
  Cube

</body>
</html>

Follow me:

$ ls -F
greatest.html  output/

$ htmldoc -t htmlsep -d output greatest.html
BYTES: 715
BYTES: 1135
BYTES: 883
BYTES: 1024
BYTES: 1030
BYTES: 1059
BYTES: 998
BYTES: 1074
BYTES: 896

$

Before that command, we’ve had just the HTML file and an empty folder. When running HTMLDOC it shows those “BYTES” lines to inform you everything is OK. Now, let’s check what we have on the output folder:

$ ls output/
Documentary.html        Other.html              Strange.html
GreatestBandsEver.html  PunkRock.html           index.html
GreatestMoviesEver.html Softcore.html           toc.html

Great! Each heading went to its own file, named accordingly. The extra files are “index.html” and “toc.html”, that holds the cover page and the Table of Contents. All the pages have the following navigation links: Contents, Previous, Next, so you can browse them in a sequence.

Handy, simple and fast.

You may play with other options to customize the files:

$ htmldoc -t htmlsep -d output \\
	--no-title --toclevels 2 --toctitle "Contents" \\
	greatest.html

Remember that big old User Guide in HTML that has hanging around on the txt2tags site? Now it is separated in multiple files. If you prefer the all-in-one version, download the PDF (see About topic).

Note 1: HTMLDOC has no support for CSS. You’ll have to add the <link> tag to the generated files.

Note 2: HTMLDOC reads the file data since the first heading. Use a %!postproc to remove the <H1>Page Title</H1> line when converting to HTML.

Note 3: Download HTMLDOC from www.htmldoc.org, which is the free Open Source version. If you’re in Linux search for “htmldoc” in your package manager. On the Mac you can find it on Fink, or download and compile the sources (it’s quick). Windows users may have to install the commercial demo from Easy Software.

New translations: Swedish and Chinese

The txt2tags Team continues to grow. New contributors have spent their spare time helping to improve the program documentation. A big WELCOME to the newcomers!

• Per Erik Strandberg translated the Sample file to Swedish.
• wfifi translated the program messages (potfile) to Chinese.
• Nicolas Dumoulin revised the User Guide’s French translation.

Their work is already online on the documentation page.

And you?

Maybe you could help us and translate the Markup Demo or the sample file to your language? It’s quick and easy! Takes just a few minutes. Start now!