<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Hi,<div class=""><br class=""><div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On 03.03.2015, at 13:05, Lubomir I. Ivanov <<a href="mailto:neolit123@gmail.com" class="">neolit123@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><span style="font-family: Menlo-Regular; font-size: 11px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; display: inline !important;" class="">i think, before you start writing the proposal users should provide</span><br style="font-family: Menlo-Regular; font-size: 11px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;" class=""><span style="font-family: Menlo-Regular; font-size: 11px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; display: inline !important;" class="">feedback on what level of customization they want from the print</span><br style="font-family: Menlo-Regular; font-size: 11px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;" class=""><span style="font-family: Menlo-Regular; font-size: 11px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; display: inline !important;" class="">layouting.</span><br style="font-family: Menlo-Regular; font-size: 11px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;" class=""><span style="font-family: Menlo-Regular; font-size: 11px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; display: inline !important;" class="">Davide, Robert - any ideas?</span><br style="font-family: Menlo-Regular; font-size: 11px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;" class=""></div></blockquote></div><br class=""></div><div class="">I think my old comments still apply: Typesetting is a highly non-trivial task (in particular if your expectations are more than basic), even decent line breaks are not easy to get let alone more complex formatting tasks. I think it would be foolish to attempt to set it up from scratch. Even without templates/user definable layout we currently fail miserable in this task. To my mind, we need to rely on external tools (library or program) to produce decent output on a printer. Setting things up by putting text in some rectangles will not do. For similar reasons, I don’t think html is the way to go since it is designed to render on screens rather than sheets of paper. You only need to look at the current gymnastics we do not to run over the bottom of the sheet. To me, doing proper typesetting is the hard part, making this configurable (for example with templates) is then secondary.</div><br class="">One way to go would be to pipe into LibreOffice writer (to use other open source software) and rely on it’s abilities to turn strings of characters and tables into decent pdf. But I don’t think this is very elegant (and it will without doubt be painful).<div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I would like to argue once more to use TeX as the typesetting engine (I have done so in the past).</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">There is one obvious downside of this: Joe Average User (probably everybody outside academia) does not have TeX installed and with all its fonts and utilities it is a huge software package. And this is why this proposal was turned down in the past.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">But please, let me one last time argue its pros:</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">o) Even though it is not installed, it is not that hard to install. Packages exists essentially for all platforms, it is just one dependency (for pdftex) on any Linux package manager, there are ready to install (single click) packages for Windows and Mac. And is probably the prime example of stability: Since the mid-1980s every TeX source as produced exactly the same output only any platform. Version problems are nonexistent (thanks to the stubbornness of Don Knuth).</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">o) As it is an external program, we don’t need to force it on users. Only those users who want to use subsurface to produce prime quality paper logbook pages would need to install it.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">o) Typesetting quality is second to none (as a lot of research has gone into it)</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">o) Its input is very simple, in that respect it is similar to html (ascii as input format).</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">o) As such it is trivial to use with any templating solution. In fact, since it is a macro language, it already comes with this.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">To illustrate, I attached a patch that adds a simple prototype of TeX-printing to current master (I actually use this to produce my paper log from subsurface). </div></body></html>