I am building a blog with Django. This blog is made up by posts whose content would benefit a lot from using Markdown syntax. But some of this posts also include SageMath cells, which process some Python-Sage Code enclosed in some special divs, as in this tutorial. Now every Markdown engine parses the Python code, and both tools (Markdown and SageMath) come into conflict.
Which would be smartest approach for implementing these posts?
Related
I am writing a google app engine web app using python and jinja2. Is there a simple lightweight textarea markup that I can use either for jinja2 or just generally for an HTML text area. I just want line breaks to come across and italics and bold and maybe one or two other things but I don't just want to mark is safe (and not autoescape the rest of it).
I am surprised that no one has asked a similar question and they probably have so maybe I'm just using the wrong keywords.
You could use TinyMCE to add markup features to a textarea. Visitors of your site (or administrators, if that's where you happen to use it) can then add HTML markup in a user-friendly way.
Alternatively, you could add a Markdown parser (or a similar language) that allows users to add markup using basic symbols. Your website would parse and process the content prior to displaying it.
For a long time I have been wanting to start a blog. But knowing myself, I know I won't update it often. So, I would like to club my blog with an "ebook". I'd like to write some beginner level ebook/course on Biostatistics.
Here are some examples of other blogs (+ebooks) that follow this approach:
A Byte of Python: http://www.swaroopch.com/notes/Python
BabyPips (FX trading): http://www.babypips.com/school/
Learn Python the Hard way (ebook only): http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/
I could simply use WordPress or Tumblr or some blog site to create a blog and write my tutorials there. One post for each tutorial. BUT I am leaning towards creating a more structured book with table-of-contents, sequential chapters, prev/next navigation, and even quizzes (if possible) etc. Blog-post style is better suited for independent tutorials that don't follow a structured course/book format.
For Blog section, there is WordPress etc. But I haven't figured out how to create a structured ebook like these guys have created. What software/plugin/CMS/wiki plugin to use for this?
PS: eventually, I'd also like to convert my web ebook to PDF, MOBI, EPUB format. But that is probably not hard. Most important is to publish a web ebook like these guys have done it.
UPDATE:
Ideally, I just want to be able to login and click create-> new book or new chapter or something and just write like I'd write in a WYSIWYG editor. That script should take care of generating table of content and navigation etc. I think this probably resemebles wiki script but wiki-script probably won't take care of next/prev navigation.
http://www.swaroopch.com/notes/Python uses MediaWiki, which is okay for writing books. If you want to publish in several formats, a sophisticated markup language like Markdown or reStructuredText might be more appropriate. You can use different utilities to create static web pages using those, like Sphinx, Hyde or Jinja.
I'm trying to think of a way to place Flash content into a blog post so that it appears inline between paragraphs. I'm writing a custom weblog application in Django (still learning) and I'll be using SWFObject for the embedding.
The blog is for me only so the back-end isn't too fancy. I'm simply using Django's built in admin interface. No TinyMCE rich text editor (like Wordpress), rather I've implemented Markdown.
I'd like to add Flash content into the body of a post, between paragraphs, in a way that is not coupled to any third party script. Meaning, I would prefer not to include javascript within the body of the blog post as it introduces a dependency on SWFObject. For example, I could quite easily add the following to an entry via the back-end to embed a SWF inline:
Paragraph one...
<script type="text/javascript">
swfobject.embedSWF("/path/to/flash.swf", "myContent", "200", "200", "9.0.0");
</script>
<div id="myContent"></div>
Paragraph two...
As you can see this is quite wordy and a lot to remember but it also refers to SWFObject directly. This WILL work, however I would prefer to write it in a "cleaner" more abstract way. What I was thinking of doing is creating my own parser which would translate a custom string into the above just before rendering a template.
[#SWF swf="/path/to/flash.swf" w="200" h="200" ver="9.0.0"]
I'm wondering if anyone has encountered this issue. I'd love to know how you solved it.
You might want to look into OEmbed, specifically the django-oembed project.
What are my choices for frameworks for doing Python web development and having a nice language for writing templates for CSS/HTML? A key goal for me is not to have to run a server or install many extra dependencies -- I'd like something that works just by using CGI and hopefully does not force me to do any fancy reconfiguration of Apache etc.
My goal is to write pages that look pretty very easily using templates for generating nice looking HTML with CSS, as opposed to painfully writing out HTML using print statements, and have it be modular. I don't need fancy database support and I am not planning to complex forms for user input that I need to process.
The ideal framework will also have a set of templates written in it that I can use for my website.
I essentially just want to make pages programmatically from Python that look good using CSS/HTML without much work.
How can I do this? Something like Django for example would be overkill, since what I am doing is very simple. (Django is great, don't get me wrong, but my purposes are way too simple).
More specifics about my app:
I want to make a gallery of photos and also display Python code next to each photo. So I'd like to have a way to easily get syntax highlighting etc. in HTML for Python code. Just like Wordpress has many nice templates for blogs, I'd like a combination of web framework and templating language that has a gallery examples of components I can reuse, so that I don't have to write my own CSS/HTML for making menus/headers/other components of a page look good.
thanks.
Well, you're probably not going to find a framework with templates like that included, simply because that's out of most frameworks' scopes. The page structure, variables, and the like of any given Web application are going to be considerably different from each other, so good generic templates are hard to write. The reason people have so many templates and themes for Wordpress (which, though its authors sometimes promote it as a framework, is just an application) is because there are limits on what you can do with it. Frameworks don't have as many such limits. You are probably going to have to find the templates somewhere else and adapt them to the template language you want to use.
On the subject of template languages, as far as a good, modular template language is concerned, Jinja2 is hard to beat. It's fast, easy to write in, and powerful. I have taken quite a few templates from other Web sites and added the Jinja2 markup relatively effortlessly. Flask is a nice, light framework that works well with it, and it can deploy to CGI. And as for syntax highlighting, I'm going to have to go with Ignacio and recommend Pygments. All of these libraries are well-documented, so you should be able to figure them out easily.
Unfortunately, as much as I would like to have a gallery of reusable theme components, those are not easy to find. You're going to have to scrounge around the Web and hack stuff together yourself.
There's some docs, some tools, and some more tools. Plus, flup can turn any WSGI framework into a CGI app. And there's Pygments for syntax highlighting.
I am after a pure Python solution (for the GAE) to convert webpages to pdf.
I had a look at reportlab but the documentation focuses on generating pdfs from scratch, rather than converting from HTML.
What do you recommend? - pisa?
Edit:
My use case is I have a HTML report that I want to make available in PDF too. I will make updates to this report structure so I don't want to maintain a separate PDF version, but (hopefully) convert automatically.
Also because I generate the report HTML I can ensure it is well formed XHTML to make the PDF conversion easier.
Pisa claims to support what I want to do:
pisa is a html2pdf converter using the
ReportLab Toolkit, the HTML5lib and
pyPdf. It supports HTML 5 and CSS 2.1
(and some of CSS 3). It is completely
written in pure Python so it is
platform independent. The main benefit
of this tool that a user with Web
skills like HTML and CSS is able to
generate PDF templates very quickly
without learning new technologies.
Easy integration into Python
frameworks like CherryPy, KID
Templating, TurboGears, Django, Zope,
Plone, Google AppEngine (GAE) etc.
So I will investigate it further
Have you considered pyPdf? I doubt it has anywhere like the functional richness you require, but, it IS a start, and is in pure Python. The PdfFileWriter class would be the one to generate PDF output, unfortunately it requires PageObject instances and doesn't provide real ways to put those together, except extracting them from existing PDF documents. Unfortunately all richer pdf page-generation packages I can find do appear to depend on reportlab or other non-pure-Python libraries:-(.
What you're asking for is a pure Python HTML renderer, which is a big task to say the least ('real' renderers like webkit are the product of thousands of hours of work). As far as I'm aware, there aren't any.
Instead of looking for an HTML to PDF converter, what I'd suggest is building your report in a format that's easily converted to both - for example, you could build it as a DOM (a set of linked objects), and write converters for both HTML and PDF output. This is a much more limited problem than converting HTML to PDF, and hence much easier to implement.