Simbel

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Simbel
Created by				Alexander Nicholi
Written in				C, C*
OSes				Sirius DOS
ISAs				i286
Licence				ASL 1.1

Simbel is a document generation tool that consumes several categories of input information to create an abstract document that can then be rendered logically into various publication mediums including XHTML, HTML5, and PDF (and therefore including print).

Conceptual overview

The central object of Simbel is a schematic which references all of the input in their various forms, including details about their placement, weight, truncation and other context. This schematic can then be rendered into one of several output formats described below, or it may be finalised and compressed as-is in the Abu format for preservation or further processing by other tools. The schematic itself never contains the content, but is rather bundled with it, potentially in finalised Abu archives.

Forms of input

Simbel ingests several forms of content input, including:

• Cliffdocs — a terse, source-embedded form of code documentation
  • typically these include plain comments interspersed throughout implementations, not "doc comments" with Doxygen or the like
• Manual pages, or "manpages" — long-form literature text that explains code in-depth
• Diagrams — flowcharts and other easily vectorised technical graphics that aid explanation
• Photographs — DCT-type raster images for more subjective illustrations
• Hypermedia — not a direct format but a property of the other input formats that is merged and collated

Canonical formats

Simbel uses the RFC format as its chief medium of text storage. Figures are reserved space in the document flow and embedded programmatically by Simbel at render time according to the desired format's needs. Textual data is encoded in this format and thereby as a superset of the self-evident ASCII-compatible TTY format. RFC means that authors should expect 72-column lines and 50-line pages, excluding margins, headers and footers which are managed separately.

Further rendering

Simbel targets the following formats for rasterization of its ADM:

• XHTML 1.0 (for reading on tablets and computers)
• LaTeX (to be translated into page description formats like PDF)
• Abu format (see below)

Abu format

Simbel will provide a stabilised public ABI via a file format that contains all of the necessary data and metadata for output. This allows others to target new formats using nothing more than the knowledge of this file format, and it also allows dynamic rendering and navigation in the form of editor plugins. Abu also serves as the "intermediate representation" that Simbel uses to instantiate its templates for XHTML, HTML and LaTeX.

This format is to be built on top of a DOS-compatible subset of the PKZIP archive format.

Interface

Program name

simbel^Unix SIMBEL.COM^DOS

Verbs

check check a schematic for validation and resource satisfiability

[schematic file] the schematic to check for validity

--verbose, -v be verbose about the checking process

graph graph a schematic's resource dependencies

[schematic file] the schematic to graph

--ascii, -a _optional output in ASCII to stdout (this is the default when no flag is given)

--vector, -v _optional output in vector graphics format to stdout

render render a schematic into a file

[schematic file] the schematic to render from

[output file] the output file to be rendered

--guess, -g _optional guess the output format from the file extension (this is the default when no flag is given)

--xhtml, -x _optional output to XHTML 1.0

--dvi, -d _optional output to DVI

pack pack up a schematic for preservation or transmission

[schematic file] the schematic to pack

[abu archive file] the Abu-compatible archive file to output to

--fat, -f _optional output a fat archive, embedding all resources (this is the default when no flag is given)

--thin, -t _optional output a thin archive, only referencing all resources

--lz4, -l _optional compress the archive with LZ4

--lzip, -L _optional compress the archive with Lzip

--uncompressed, -u _optional do not compress the archive

--normal, -n _optional use normal compression levels with LZ4/Lzip (this is the default when a bare compression flag is given)

--max, -m _optional use maximum compression levels with LZ4/Lzip