Plain Text Solutions: Presented by Steve Daley

Steve Daley is a full time pastor who got started with Linux because he had of a lot of old computers that he was looking to make use of. Since getting started with Linux, Steve's main projects involve networking, setting up a web-server, and producing documents.

In a presentation titled Plain Text Solutions, Steve showed how he uses the pain text format to make his job easier and more productive.

Why Plain Text?

A plain text solution involves utilizing the plain text format to make tasks easier, including printing, generating web pages, PDF's, and more. Plain text in this situation refers to the means used to accomplish a task, not necessarily the final output. Sometimes this involves writing a file in plain text and then converting it to the format desired.

What advantages does plain text offer?

Who would want to use a plain text format?

Note Please stand by: Technical difficulties caused Windows XP to crash, reboot required

Why Steve uses plain text

Steve produces a lot of writings for sermons, and uses plain text because it is fast to load, portable, and independent. Openoffice is an alternative that is platform independent, but OpenOffice has its own set of problems:

If needed, other programs can be used for “beautification” such as OpenOffice, Abiword, or Scribus.
[Scribus is a powerful desktop publishing program]

Linux Tools

Linux comes with a powerful set of plain text programs, including:

Problems Encountered Using Plain Text

Printing From CLI

How do you print from CLI? Options include:

Enscript gives you a lot of power from the command line. You can actually have lot of fun in this program. Enscript can print in specific fonts, (Fonts available depend on printer) columns, headers, and much more. Examples of callouts you would used include:

enscript --word-wrap --media=letter $file.txt

enscript --word-wrap --media=letter --font=Times-Roman10 -Gr2 $file.txt

How to Easily Convert Plain Text to HTML or PDF

AsciiDoc is the solution. AsciiDoc is a plain text processor with readable markup, not a lot of code, and can export to html, pdf, docbook, xhtml, linuxdoc, and more.

More AsciiDoc features include

  • Extensive table support

  • Capable of including other plain text files

  • Special graphic accented blocks of text

  • Table of contents
    [Table of contents with hyperlinks can be generated in java by AsciiDoc]

  • Glossary, Indexes, and Bibliography

  • Callouts

What is AsciiDoc Used for on a Daily Basis?

Questions

  1. Is AsciiDoc difficult to learn?

    AsciiDoc is easy to learn (compared to latex)

  2. Does AsciiDoc produce readable html code?

    CSS is put in the header, and html is very readable

  3. Can you change the default styles?

    CSS configuration file is editable, however the AsciiDoc defaults are quite good

  4. Does AsciiDoc support mathematical formulae?

    Yes, it also supports other formats such as musical notes

Constitution

The vote to adopt the constitution was unanimous, with 18 votes. Special thanks to those who helped write the constitution, we spent quite a few hours making sure the language was right, and trying to get rid of any loopholes etc… Thanks to all involved in drafting process.

The constitution was then reviewed to clear up any questions that had been posed.

Elections Planning

What this means is that we need to think about elections:

And that's the story of the constitution getting off the ground.

Shooting the Breeze

Kalzium: Periodic Table

A long discussion on the history of sodium ensues…

Showing Off Live CD's

Elive

Kororaa

Meeting Adjourned