Any libraries to aid weird shaped source code programming - language-agnostic

Any libraries to aid writing programs with source code shaped like drawings
(such as http://www.ioccc.org/1998/banks.c or http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c/msg/e105e5d339edec01). For any language.

Your second link made my day :D And it really works!
If you want to play with source code, perl is your friend! Have a look at http://search.cpan.org/~asavige/Acme-EyeDrops-1.55/lib/Acme/EyeDrops.pm for an example. I know you want a language agnostic tool, but I don't think such a thing exists.

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Make a html to pdf converter

I am pretty new to developing softwares and am intrigued by the huge world out there!! I have working knowledge of C/C++ and Java.. I was thinking of making an application that would convert a webpage to a pdf document.. I know there are many solutions available -- both online and offline..But I want to develop my own.. I googled but couldn't find anything that would help me get started..
I want to know how do we go about a conversion process?? How to get started?? What languages and technologies are pre-requisites for making a converter like this??
Thank You
So at least you need to get to the bottom to following specifications:
HTML specification
CSS specification
JavaScript specification
PDF specification
Moreover here are a lot of minor stuff such as Fonts, Decription/Encription algorithms and many many other minor but still necessary things.
I think you can imagine that this is quite a long way to get all this working. In fact, the complexity of such software is the reason why so many companies make money in this field.
Anyway, I'd suggest you to start from the simple things and grow your software gradually. Start with converting HTML to Image, because it is a bit simpler. Take and parse HTML, its CSS, its JavaScript. Clean HTML. Build DOM of the HTML document. Apply styles. Go thru the DOM and draw elements to the image.
Good luck!

Actionscript 3 code beautifier for xpand (MWE2 Workflow)

I
Currently I'm developing a code generator for Java and Actionscript3.
The generator works quiet well, but the Actionscript3 code isn't really nice.
For Java, there is an existing code beautifier integrated with xpand (MWE2 Workflow) but for Actionscript3 I cannot find anything.
Any idea? Perhaps someone have a ready to use AS3 code beautifier or knows a third party beautifier which may be integrated with xpand and MWE2 Workflow
Take a look at the uncrustify post-processor. It passes the generated output to a command line tool to produce the actual output with the desired indentation. If uncrustify itself doesn't suit you, the source code of the post-processor might help you to attach you own external tool.
After a long search, I have written a small beautifier at my own. It don't do much, only counting the { and indent as well as removing unnecessary line-breaks.
The result isn't really beautifully, but at least the code is more readable.
Thanks for the help
Try this http://jsbeautifier.org/ I know it's for JS ,but i tried and it worked.

What do people use to make websites?

Well, I know a little HTML, and I'm just interested in playing around with it. I was wondering, though, do people usually write websites from scratch, or do they use templates, or do they use WYSIWYG editors?
To me, it seems like writing from scratch is unnecessary, nowadays, with the editors and templates we have, but maybe I'd be better off to try write something from scratch from learning purposes?
So, if I want to learn HTML better than I do, what is the best way to go about it (I have access to a free server) and how do professional website creators do it? Maybe this is an obvious answer but I'm quite new to it. Thanks!
If from scratch means hand-writing the markup, yes, that's the correct way to do it.
WYSIWYG, fully-bloated editors, are not good alternatives if you are serious about writing a web-site -- as most drag-and-drop-and-run systems out there. They might serve their purposes, but they are not general professional solution.
Hand-written markup (HTML, XHTML) and CSS will always provide better cross-browser compatibility, will be much more optimized and easier to maintain.
I really like Aptana Studio. It is an IDE that enables you to easily write the markup (HTML, XHTML), the formatting (CSS), the client-side code (ie, animations, etc, through JavaScript, and it is really well integrated with common JavaScript frameworks) as well as server-side code in a very professional way (PHP, Ruby, and many others). Oh, and it's free.
Aptana is better than, say, Notepad clones, because it is adapted to Web Development: all the time you have context menus popping up containing hints about compatibility, it displays errors on the markup, etc. It understands your code better than most notepad clones do.
I definitely recommend writing from scratch when you are learning. Using a wysiwyg editor can create a lot of extra code that you have no idea how to deal with when something strange happens and you have to edit the HTML itself. Using something like Notepad++ that supports code highlighting can help a lot.
the secret of html is: not writing it. means: keep it as tiny and semantically as possible and thats where all WYSIWYG editors fail. they let you create 403 nested dom elements whit 2 mouseclicks and if you are a beginner you don't even realize how wrong that is.
I agree with others that learning HTML makes sense. But at the same time, you can use WYSIWYG as a learning tool if necessary. I know that when I first started creating websites, margins and padding always seemed hard to properly format (due in part to inconsistencies across various browsers), and using a visual editor did help me figure out how changing certain values affected the view.
My favorite WYSIWYG editor is probably Nvu just because it is free and less bloated than software like Frontpage. But as others have noted, just practice with HTML. Check out w3schools for a nice intro and reference pieces.
Depends on the budget and software adquisition posibilities (yes, the budget).
Assuming you are talking about research, design, development, scripts, flash and everything you need the best option is Adobe Creative Suite for Web Designers.
There´s no powerfull editor in the world than Dreamweaver and that´s a fact.
You should use Notepad, Notepad++, jEdit and whatever you want but if you want to be productive a serious IDE is the best choice and Adobe win by far.
My opinion!

track and display changes in html

I am looking for a tool to display/track changes in text a little bit like it is done on stackoverflow when a question is edited. Does anybody know of a tool to achieve that?
You may want to use diff for that.
If you can use PHP on your server there's a handy pear package to perform the task you require. Here's an example :
https://web.archive.org/web/1/http://articles.techrepublic%2ecom%2ecom/5100-10878_11-6174867.html
There's actually a actually Javascript implementations outhere as well, not tested though:
http://ejohn.org/projects/javascript-diff-algorithm/
http://aignes.net/
Commercial tool though. I have no idea of a F/OSS alternative.
A copy of my own answer from here.
What about DaisyDiff (Java and PHP vesions available).
Following features are really nice:
Works with badly formed HTML that can be found "in the wild".
The diffing is more specialized in HTML than XML tree differs. Changing part of a text node will not cause the entire node to be changed.
In addition to the default visual diff, HTML source can be diffed coherently.
Provides easy to understand descriptions of the changes.
The default GUI allows easy browsing of the modifications through keyboard shortcuts and links.

How best to write documentation targeting both HTML and PDF? [closed]

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Latex-to-html converters I've seen in the past have been pretty awful. Editing raw html is no fun and doesn't seem to translate well to the printed page. How do others solve this problem? Links to examples (both pdf and html) would be great.
Added: Another similar question was just asked:
What formatting language should I use for project documentation
For documenting code, I also recommend Sphinx. ReStructured Text is nice because it is readable and somewhat marked up in plaintext, and can do a nice job converting to html and to pdf. I still like LaTeX for certain things. My wife and I use LaTeX to write our christmas letter, which we mail out via snail mail. The pdf version is pretty fancy, with two columns, and headers and footers. The html version is simpler. I convert with plastex. Examples here:
http://fedibblety.com/annualReports
I don't think any binary format is a good choice (Word) for any sort of document that you might like to read 10 years from now. That is one of the nice things about LaTeX.
Yes, LaTeX-to-HTML converters used to suck (you've probably tried LaTeX2HTML), but of late they've got better. Tex4ht is highly configurable, and produces nice XHTML+CSS. See also other converters.
You can also use Docbook, if you can bear to write in it. There are converters from DocBook to both HTML and LaTeX (or to PDF directly); an example of the latter is dblatex.
See this post: LaTeX vs Docbook.
After many years of anguish and several false starts, I'm about to revisit this, and I'm going to give Sphinx a try. It can generate HTML or LaTeX from ReStructured Text.
I'm hoping it will be a much "lighter" option than full DocBook, but with many of the advantages.
You could take a step back and use something like DocBook and render to PDF via LaTeX and HTML straight from the DocBook files. Alternatively, Adobe Technical Communication Suite (Framemaker) will let you single-source a document to PDF and HTML. See this posting for a rundown on various technical documentation systems.
This is a personal choice but Latex in theory is perfect however in practice it's pain-in-the-arse. I'm using VS.NET HTML editor + raw HTML edit when I need it.
So I think using an WSIWYG HTML editor is best choice. You can always use a simple tool to convert it to PDF, and you can always edit HTML when you need something advanced. Also it's easier to put online when you need.
That's how I'm managing my software documentations and works fine for me.
PlasTeX looks like a nice latex-to-html converter, though I haven't tried it myself.
My friend Rob Felty wrote a blog post extolling its virtues:
http://blog.robfelty.com/2008/03/19/finally-a-better-latex-to-html-converter/
AsciiDoc looks like an interesting possibility.
Read about EPUB format. Its e-book format. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB
Since the answer mentioning Asciidoc was somewhat short on examples, here are some of the things your are looking for:
A pdf generated with Asciidoc
A cheatsheet with a side by side of the Asciidoc markup and the html result.
A list of publications done using Asciidoc, including O'Reilly books and the git documentation (to see both ends of the user scale).
I'm not sure that latex is really the best tool for this. The trouble you're having with the usual latex to html converter is indicative of the problem: html is simple not as expressive as latex.
If you insist on latex to html, take care to use a limited subset that can convert reasonably.
I've used TeXinfo in the past and it does a good job. Here's an example: http://yootles.com/api. I'd prefer to stick with LaTeX though instead of use another language.
If everything else fails you could grab an LaTeX to XML converter and write a simple XSLT stylesheet to convert it to HTML, or create a CSS style sheet and attach it to the XML file directly.
We've been using WebWorks ePublisher (www.webworks.com) which offers both multiple single-source formats (we are using Word) and the ability to output to many output formats (we output to Adobe PDF and Online Help (.CHM).
We were facing this problem in an academic project that involved Eclipse software, and we used plastex to convert Latex to HTML and Eclipse Help. Getting it to work was quite difficult, but the end result looks really nice. You can see all three versions here:
http://handbook.event-b.org/
Further, as this is an open project, the code (build scripts) are available. We have a continuous build system (Jenkins) that rebuilds everything when new Latex is checked in. This is particularly nice, as contributors don't need to install the toolchain on their systems. They just check in the new Latex and check on the server whether the HTML was produced correctly. Sources:
http://sourceforge.net/p/rodin-b-sharp/svn/HEAD/tree/trunk/Handbook/org.rodinp.handbook.feature/
Best, Michael
I don't have enough points to comment, but to bolster the plastex answer, here is the updated plastex example link:
http://robfelty.com/2008/03/19/finally-a-better-latex-to-html-converter
LaTeX? Seriously? I wasn't aware anyone outside academia still used it. I'd go with HTML, which you can save as PDF from the web browser. If you really must have some advanced typographic stuff, go with Word instead - it has a way to save to HTML (probably not as clean as one would like), and you can save as PDF with a free plug-in (downloadable separately).
Oh, and I wouldn't bother using things like InDesign - they are overkill. Also, don't bother paying for Acrobat Professional - there is a zillion free solutions available.