First attempt at Rebol - 16 hours later

greg.schofield
23-Sep-2007/10:48:40-4:00
#43061
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I am no programmer, as a quick glance here will tell:

http://members.iinet.net.au/%7Egreg.schofield/rebol/Rebol%20start.zip

GUIs proved beyond me, at least a good quarter or more of the 16 hours pr=
oved that.

I have now got to the point however, where I need to use them.

The script is messy, and even has redundant code in it (from failed exper=
iements mostly).

The aim is simple enough - take a text file of a book from OCR, or in the=
 exmples given, from the Gutenberg project and mark them up.

The problem is that it necessarily a human undertaking (relying on grep, =
or search and replace is hazardess - the source material is not reliable =
or consistent).

The aim is to use carriage returns as suggested markers, but allow the us=
er to group and identify parts of the books as chapters, sections, etc.,.=


For this it generates a map of patterns and from these the user needs to =
click on the map and see the text before selecting what shoud be done wit=
h it.

The idea is to make a dialect in plain English which identifies what is t=
o be done with what and when satisified that the description fits the wor=
k, then have it processed.

REBOL's block series has been a blessing, it makes a lot of things easy (=
but I still have a lot to learn).

If anyone has the time please run my script with the examples found in th=
e zip.

Any comment would be welcomed.

I am an English teacher and need to produce textbooks cheaply and easily =
-  the long term aim is to have texts taged in TEI XML and generate PDFs =
from there, for both screen and paper reading.

At the moment I am doing it all by hand via OpenOffice - the script even =
as it now stands (incomplete) already saves me hours, if I can get it to =
the next stage, it should only take a few minutes to get it ready for lay=
out at least.


BTW learning a language from scratch and at least creating something half=
-useful is a big complement to just how good REBOL is, especially as I wo=
uld probably spend less than 50 hours a year doing any form of scripting =
(REXX).

Greg Schofield
Perth Australia

REBOL.com