walle / gimli

Utility for converting markup files to pdf files
https://github.com/walle/gimli
MIT License
538 stars 44 forks source link

Handle multiple files #40

Open ScreamingDev opened 11 years ago

ScreamingDev commented 11 years ago

Situation

walle commented 11 years ago

I'll look into this.

floere commented 9 years ago

This would be great to have. @walle Have you looked into it by any chance?

walle commented 9 years ago

Yes, I have, the thing is that I haven't had time (motivation really) to implement the feature.

The design of gimli is kind of broken from the start, I wrote it to be able to quickly generate nice pdfs for some reports that I was writing, and the use case then was to generate all files, or just one.

A better approach had been to use the common unix way eg. cp SOURCE... DIRECTORY like mdpdf (https://github.com/walle/mdpdf#usage) does. To take one or many files (or stdin) and write it to a file (or stdout). This gives a lot more flexibility and makes it possible to chain the application using pipes, which would be nice. Please note that the mdpdf application is a quick project I wrote to get back my C legs and doesn't have all the features gimli does.

I have started writing a specification that should take into account all the use cases and properly document the features available, I have some work to do left though. But my idea is to ask the community (~350 stars so hopefully I will get some response) to read the specification and improve on it. When the specification is set implement it. The specification would give some structure to the development, eg. changes would be discussed in regards to the spec before implementing them. The more structured development (I think) would give me more motivation to work on the project.

So this change would enable this feature (and give some extra perks).

floere commented 9 years ago

Thanks for your explanation :)