Re: Installing html2lout on Debian 5 (Lenny)

[Paul Zarucki]

Thank you Mark and David for your helpful replies.

Mark's Perl script does very well (now that I have the correct version 
of readonly.pm) and, with some modifications, I think I should be able 
to make it do exactly what I need with my HTML documents. For best 
results I suspect I need to convert elements from the HTML style sheet 
into corresponding Lout formatting options.

I'm afraid David's Awk script didn't work with my documents. The output 
contained Lout formatting commands but none of the text from my HTML 
document!

FYI, I am writing an extension to Simple Groupware (a web-based 
application written in PHP) to semi-automatically generate and print 
documents using content and templates read from a database. I have 
chosen to generate the documents in HTML format as this allows manual 
edits to be made using Simple Groupware's somewhat WYSIWYG HTML editor 
(a nice feature for not-so-technical users). I'm experimenting with 
various methods of converting from HTML to PDF and printer-ready 
formats. wkhtmltopdf produces a faithful rendition of the HTML but Lout 
seems to do a nicer job of the typesetting and layout, hence my interest 
in converting HTML to Lout.

Thanks for your help.

Paul.

Mark Summerfield wrote:
> Hi Paul,
>
> On Mon, 28 Mar 2011 12:40:52 +0100
> Paul Zarucki<address@hidden>  wrote:
>    
> > When I try to use html2lout on Debian 5 I get the following error
> > message
> >
> > Can't locate readonly.pm in @INC ...
> > at /usr/local/lib/site_perl/Lout.pm line 192
> >
> > Using cpan, I couldn't find a module called readonly.pm but did find
> > one called Readonly.pm. I installed this and changed "use readonly"
> > to "use Readonly" in Lout.pm but I now get this error message:
> >
> > "$AT" is not exported by the Readonly module
> >    "Compilation failed in require at /usr/local/bin/html2lout line 11
> >
> > Am I using the wrong "readonly.pm"? If so, where do I get the correct
> > one?
> >      
> I abandoned html2lout---and Perl---many years ago when I switched to
> Python. I didn't even know html2lout was packaged for Debian (or for any
> Linux distro).
>
> I've attached readonly.pm (gzipped 3.6K); you could try putting that in
> the same directory as Lout.pm and it might work.
>
> I'd recommend finding or writing a new program to convert from HTML to
> lout. (I haven't written one---what I'd really like is lout2html:-)
>
>