Forrest: responses

[Tom Klaasen <to...@pandora.be>]

I've used Forrest to build some documentation for my client. I've presented it to some people already, and all reactions were "ooohh..." and "aaaahh....". Some even asked where they could find this tool, so they could play with it themselves. And those are not Java people! Great.

When I present Forrest, I start with "it's a site", and "it's generated from xml". "You put your xml through a command line tool, and then you get this html". Occasionally, I change the skin, rebuild, and get some more "ooohhh". But the final feature that makes them go "I want that" is the auto-generation of the PDF files. Great, they think, two files with the effort of typing one. And right they are :-)

The only thing that looks like a drawback (give a finger, and they'll want an arm) is that all PDFs are per-page. It's not (yet?) possible to generate one big PDF from the whole of the site. It's on Forrest's Dream List though, so I keep my hopes up that it will get there some day. In the mean time, I've quickly pondered what difficulties would come up when you implement something like that, and it didn't look too easy. You'd have to build a PDF file while crawling the site, instead of just aggregating a static collection of PDF pipelines. At least, that's how it looks from the outside. And that is probably the reason that it's not implemented yet. Ah, time, sweet time...

But overall: fantastic job, Forresteers. You really made it possible to concentrate on content instead of fighting with the text editor's whims.

(from http://blogs.cocoondev.org/tomk/archives/000766.html)


Thanks, people!

tomK