Seeking new Stylesheets

[mszep]

Right now, the project only has one style, but ideally there'd be a variety of different styles to choose from, which users could then further tweak themselves. The problem is that any style would have to be implemented both in css and ConTeXt. I presume the former has a much higher rate of adoption on github, so I'm formally volunteering to translate any interesting css styles people come up with. There are two conditions the candidate css styles should satisfy:

• Be significantly different in appearance to the existing style
• Be nice-looking. This is subjective of course, but I promise to be extremely liberal on this point. This will be judged by the stylesheet's performance on resume.md, so it needs to deal nicely with all the forms contained therein.

[SyedMusaAli]

Hey how about instead of calling this "style_green" you give it some other proper name and this could be the "green" version of it. Which, btw, implies that the same style exists in other colors as well. I mean I understand you want people to tweak and create their own styles etc, but not all of us know ConTeXT so it would be alot easier for people if they don't have to open up the tex file just to change the colors. If you're worried about this meaning a lot of extra work, then I am here to help. I usually suck at the visual stuff so I obviously can't create nice original styles, but I'd be happy to do the grunt work on making the same thing in multiple color schemes

[mszep]

Sorry for the late reply...

I agree style_green is a potentially confusing name, so I'll rename it for now. I think style_chmduquesne, after the original author, is a good way to go.

As for the colors, how about this solution: in the ConTeXt style file, we add highly visible comments saying "EDIT HERE TO CHANGE COLOR SCHEME" or something like that. We could even add commented-out alternative color schemes that we know look OK, so users would just have to make a minimal edit to change.

I'm a bit hesitant to include two almost identical style files in the repo, that sounds like it could become a pain to maintain, and the user would still need to edit the Makefile to change color schemes.

Ideally, this would be made programmatic so a user could just type make --style=blue or something like that, but that requires far more work..

[SyedMusaAli]

Great idea. And i totally forgot about the makefile as I usually just enter the commands into the terminal. Yeah it would be a pain to manage too many identical ones.

Ideally, this would be made programmatic so a user could just type make --style=blue or something like that, but that requires far more work..

That sounds like a plan. How about a simple C utility? maybe the template files can have some sort of annotations that correspond to some settings. Like if i choose "style_chmduquesne" with the parameter "blue", it would create the template files with all the settings corresponding to "blue" and then use this generated template file to create the resume? Doesn't sound like much work and ofcourse I am here to help :) I can write the program, but you'd need to come up with the styles cuz i really suck at all the aesthetic stuff

[SyedMusaAli]

We can even write a sort of manual/readme to tell people how to add annotated, multi-style templates to the system.

[mszep]

The functionality you describe is already present in pandoc (see http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/demo/example9/templates.html), so I was thinking to just use that :-)

Variables could be defined at the command line when invoking make (see http://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html#Overriding) and these could then be passed on to pandoc via the -V option.

I might be overestimating how much work this is, actually. Would you be interested in trying to make this work?

[SyedMusaAli]

Sure! I'll look into this.

[nitrocode]

I'd like to add some new styles. Do you guys have any tips on debugging pandoc latex / css templates? Is there a recommended IDE?

[mszep]

Unfortunately I'm not aware of any IDE, I just implemented the existing style by trial and error using a text editor, a browser and pdf viewer.

[nitrocode]

That makes me sad because that sounds very difficult!

I just discovered TexStudio so I'll play with that. Until now, I'd been running an inotify script to detect file changes and then it would keep rerunning the pandoc command to generate the files. Kind of a headache that I hope the IDE will resolve.