Is Nested Still an active project?
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Yves Cloutier
Apr 9, 2014, 6:42:26 PM4/9/14
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Hello,
I would like to know if Nested is still an active project?
Regards,
yves
I would like to know if Nested is still an active project?
Regards,
yves
Carlos Jenkins
Apr 15, 2014, 7:54:28 PM4/15/14
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Hi Yves,
Install dependencies:
sudo apt-get install python2.7 python-gtk2 python-webkit texlive-publishers texlive texlive-latex-extra rubber iso-codes python-gtkspellcheck
No, and yes.
The short answer:
Nested 1.4 will be the last release of Nested. No new development will be done on Nested as it is understood now. A new project was born to pick the unique concepts Nested was built on, but a release for it will be in at least a couple of years.
The long answer:
The development moved to:
As you can see, two branches, apart the 1.X series, exists in the repository.
2.X -> This branch once looked to improve the current Nested version implementing new features like bibliography support, plugins and other nice things. The development on this branch stopped to solve a more important issue with the Nested code base. This important issue is explained below. Many new features were implemented, but this branch never saw a release.
3.X -> This branch was created to address a much bigger issues:
- Nested was written in PyGtk, the old Gtk bindings. PyGtk will no longer be updated, the last supported Gtk version is the 2.14. Now that Gtk+ 3.0 has introspection support the dynamic bindings PyGObject were created. We needed to migrate from PyGtk to PyGObject, and is not a trivial task right now, because Nested uses many custom widgets, in particular in the text editing buffer.
- Nested was written in Python 2.7. Python 3.0 is ready, a we need to migrate. The migration is not trivial.
- The text format used by Nested, txt2tags, was a bad choice. It is a poorly designed library, and it doesn't allow easy modifications and additions of new features, and their features are very limited. The library is currently hacked and patched without much sense in the core of it to support their current features. Nested was using a patched version of it, but that lead to many problems in formatting (like inability to add formatted text in footnotes, among others). This problem is the main reason why the decision to rebuild it from scratch was necessary. For the new project, the format used was just being decided: reStructuredText. reStructuredText doesn't have any of the problems of the old format and is easily extensible.
- Architectural rot. Nested grew much larger than it was ever expected, and the architecture touch for it no longer supports the new scope.
To all this, and the need to add many new features, it didn't make much sense to continue with the current codebase, and development of the 3.X branch was dropped.
Nevertheless, Nested is a mature project used widely in some universities, it is actively used and there is many thesis and works made with it. It can be installed in Linux and will be until the new project is ready (and Windows, but nobody has time to create a build for it). When the new project is ready, it will be able to import Nested t2t files.
Nested started as a university founded project. The funding ended and now it is maintained by me. The new project is still in early stages, and I do it in my spare time, and I calculate that the first version will be ready in a couple of years.
If you're interest in trying the last release of the 1.X branch, Nested 1.4, there is how:
Install Nested 1.4
mkdir Nested
cd Nested
unzip v1.4.zip
Launch Nested:
cd nested-1.4/
./nested.run
Thanks for the interest.
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Carlos Jenkins
http://carlos.jenkins.co.cr/
Eric Forgeot
Apr 21, 2014, 5:51:31 AM4/21/14
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> The text format used by Nested, txt2tags, was a bad choice. It is a poorly designed library, and it doesn't allow easy modifications and additions of new features, and their features are very limited.
The right way of using txt2tags was to write preprocessors for it,
instead of hacking the core.
It's what I did with textallion, and I never felt limited:
https://code.google.com/p/textallion/
> The library is currently hacked and patched without much sense in the core of it to support their current features. Nested was using a patched version of it, but that lead to many problems in formatting (like inability to add formatted text in footnotes, among others).
bold, as you can see in page 14 of this document:
http://anamnese.online.fr/site2/textallion/docs/documentation_fr.pdf
(the translated manual is there:
http://anamnese.online.fr/site2/textallion/docs/documentation_en.pdf
but there is no example of formatted footnotes in it yet)
The txt2tags code is: (for example to create footnotes with °° which
is easily reachable on a french keyboard but you can use whatever you
want)
% Footnote alt + 248
%!preproc: '\{ \°\° \}' '°°'
% MASCULINE ORDINAL INDICATOR alternative (alt+0186 on windows)
%!preproc: '\{ \º\º \}' '°°'
%!postproc(tex): '°°(.*?)°°' '\\footnote{\1}'
Offray Luna
Apr 21, 2014, 12:45:09 PM4/21/14
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Hi,
On 21/04/14 04:51, Eric Forgeot wrote:
>> The text format used by Nested, txt2tags, was a bad choice. It is a poorly designed library, and it doesn't allow easy modifications and additions of new features, and their features are very limited.
> The right way of using txt2tags was to write preprocessors for it,
> instead of hacking the core.
> It's what I did with textallion, and I never felt limited:
> https://code.google.com/p/textallion/
I agree. Nested has a lot of nice ideas on interface, but the problem
was that trying to extend txt2tag modifying its core instead of the use
of regex, as indicated by txt2tags, so you end with a non-standard core
which have not support for one of the core features of the base
language: extensibility by its users via regex and processors (pre and
post).
These days my documentation needs are covered by Nikola blogging
platform[1], Leo Editor[2] and IPython notebooks[3]. Pandoc has solved
mostly my needs of a single source for several formats, but would be
nice to have this unique idea of (pre/post)processors and a unique
source for all transformations (in my case that source is mostly Leo files).
[1] http://getnikola.com/
[2] http://leoeditor.com/
[3] http://ipython.org/
Cheers,
Offray
On 21/04/14 04:51, Eric Forgeot wrote:
>> The text format used by Nested, txt2tags, was a bad choice. It is a poorly designed library, and it doesn't allow easy modifications and additions of new features, and their features are very limited.
> The right way of using txt2tags was to write preprocessors for it,
> instead of hacking the core.
> It's what I did with textallion, and I never felt limited:
> https://code.google.com/p/textallion/
was that trying to extend txt2tag modifying its core instead of the use
of regex, as indicated by txt2tags, so you end with a non-standard core
which have not support for one of the core features of the base
language: extensibility by its users via regex and processors (pre and
post).
These days my documentation needs are covered by Nikola blogging
platform[1], Leo Editor[2] and IPython notebooks[3]. Pandoc has solved
mostly my needs of a single source for several formats, but would be
nice to have this unique idea of (pre/post)processors and a unique
source for all transformations (in my case that source is mostly Leo files).
[1] http://getnikola.com/
[2] http://leoeditor.com/
[3] http://ipython.org/
Cheers,
Offray
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