Publishing Module - Good News

As far as I have been able to determine, there is no Go software that lets you "freely" format its printer output.

One should always strive for the best, so my spec required the ability for "wordprocessing-like" diagramming (not in the form of WYSIWYG but in the form of per-diagram placement hints, variable columns etc.) And output to all imaginable formats.

Output to two dozen formats (PDF, RTF, HTML etc.) is possible with a top-of-the-line Report Generator, so the past days I've been busy evaluating their feature sets. It turned out that there was only a single Report Generator with acceptable Unicode support and a rich set of output formats, but it did not have any formatting logic! Meaning, it is unable to auto-format text over columns or around images.

One would have to chop text up into text "boxes" to do that. But - there are no functions to know whether a string of text fits in a certain bounding box, so things are pretty bare-bones, with the report generators I need. There are more "clever" RG's, but they don't support Chinese mixed with Japanese and Korean, or they don't export to PDF, to give but an example.

So I purchased the source to the Report Generator I liked (Unicode & lots of output formats), and, good news, I was able to add a function that returns what part of a string does not fit in a specified bounding box! It was easier than I feared.

This will allow me to build a page generator with the capacity to format text in columns and around images - exactly what I need to offer flexibility in both output formats and page layout. Neither cost nor effort will be spared to make Moyo Go Studio a state-of-the-art Go Publishing tool. Hopefully I'll be able to produce a "technology preview" of Publishing in a few weeks.