Recent coding projects of various sorts

Plié

French folding, simplement

Anyone who’s laid out a book in inDesign and then tried to reformat it for a french fold binding knows the folly of having trusted the automatic page numbering and the pain of duplicating every gutter-spanning image.

Plié does the hard work for you, reordering the pages of any PDF file and rendering them as spreads ready for trimming and folding (crop marks optional).

Download for old-school PPC macs (v0.9)
Download for new-fangled intel macs (v0.9)
View a screenshot

Software qualifying as beyond archaic

SetextView

MDJ- & Tidbits-readers rejoice

Even in the days before the ascendency of wikis, there was some acceptance of the fact that HTML is just too verbose to read in its raw, unrendered form. A mid-90s attempt at finding a middle ground between readability and expressive markup was the Setext format.

After the canonical renderer, EasyView fell into disrepair, I hacked together this viewer application allowing you to choose the fonts and styles for the various setext tags and to read the documents as a series of chapters rather than a web-style Very Long Page.

Download version 0.3 from April 2003
View a screenshot

seTeX

Sometimes only LaTeX will do

For unix geeks with the most demanding typographical standards, the world of typesetting both begins and ends with Donald Knuth’s hoary but astoundingly sophisticated TeX system.

On the other hand, no one who hadn’t cut their teeth writing term papers in nroff would find TeX markup to constitute a functional user interface. As an attempt to offer a simpler way to compose documents in TeX without going mad from its syntax I offer seTeX, a command line tool that will convert setext markup into valid LaTeX which can then be compiled using the TeX distribution of your choice.

Download setex.pl from June 2004 (when I still used perl)