By William Jeffrey Rankin, Mon Oct 14 2024
Revision 169 of Hua supports PDF generation through Pandoc and the GNU roff (groff) typesetting system. This allows for much better looking print output than is possible through HTML and CSS.
Groff output mode is used in conjunction with article mode:
.\hua.ps1 .\hua.cfg -A '00110' -G
This command outputs two files: the HTML version of the article and a version for use in groff (it's given an .ms extension). To convert this file to PDF, run the following:
pdfroff -ms -mpdfmark -mspdf pandoc-int.html.ms > pandoc-int.html.pdf
The result looks like this (pandoc-int.html.pdf). Here's a more verbose example (old-church-stone.html.pdf). Note that only absolute links work in documents generated this way.
By William Jeffrey Rankin, Thu Sep 26 2024
As of revision 165, Hua has an article mode that enables processing of an individual article. This is useful in instances where an article is in development and requires review. In this mode only the specified article is generated; index, archive, and tagged-with files are not touched. Since only one article is processed, this mode is significantly faster as well.
jeffr@CALLISTO: D:\Documents\wjr-blog $ Measure-Command { ..\Hua\hua.ps1 .\hua.cfg -A '00100' | Out-Default }
...
Seconds : 0
Milliseconds : 375
...
jeffr@CALLISTO: D:\Documents\wjr-blog $ Measure-Command { ..\Hua\hua.ps1 .\hua.cfg | Out-Default }
...
Seconds : 3
Milliseconds : 27
...
By William Jeffrey Rankin, Thu Sep 19 2024
As of revision 157 (released Sep 18, 2024) Hua outputs specific codes based upon error condition. Normally, if all goes well, Hua exits with a status of 0. But when an error condition results, Hua outputs a message and, depending upon the severity of the error, either continues processing content or stops entirely. When the latter occurs, a non-zero exit status is generated. It can be output as seen in the examples below.
jeffr@CALLISTO: D:\Documents\wjr-blog $ ..\Hua\hua.ps1 .\wrong.cfg
Config file error. Config file path specified as .\wrong.cfg . Quitting.
jeffr@CALLISTO: D:\Documents\wjr-blog $ $LASTEXITCODE
2
jeffr@Phobos: ~/Hua $ pwsh ./hua.ps1 hua.cfg
Meta info file error. Meta file path set as .\met.csv. Quitting.
jeffr@Phobos: ~/Hua $ echo $?
9
This is useful in instances where Hua is invoked from a script or as part of a toolchain and exit status needs to be introspected. For more information, refer to the Errors section of the main Hua page.
By William Jeffrey Rankin, Thu July 4 2024
Hua now supports custom labels for paging. Labels are specified in the Hua configuration file:
next_label = Next Page
prev_label = Previous Page
Note: Spaces in labels are represented by .
By William Jeffrey Rankin, Sat Apr 6 2024
With the inclusion of paging for tagged-with-* files (revision 140), Hua is now feature complete. There's still work to do: for example, I want to simplify some of the code and I'm very interested in how well Hua performs with a large number of articles. But, for now, the tool does everything I want it to do while retaining the flexibility and simplicity I envisioned from the beginning.