Re: bug report to HTML::FormatText

Andreas Koenig (k@anna.mind.de)
Tue, 26 Sep 1995 15:00:43 +0100 

>>>>> "Gisle" == Gisle Aas <aas@oslonett.no> writes:

    Gisle> You can always make a subclass that modifies the behaviour:

Of course...

    Gisle> The way to go is to make the HTML::FormatText formatter
    Gisle> accept parameters to the constructor like HTML::FormatPS
    Gisle> already does.  I.e. you should eventually be able to say:

    Gisle>    $formatter = new HTML::FormatText LeftMargin => 0,
    Gisle> RightMargin => 60;

I like that much more than subclassing :)

    >> This would work, if HTML::Formatter would be changed as in the
    >> patch below, but I don't know what it will break:

    Gisle> [patch deleted]

    Gisle> I don't think this is a good idea.

OK, I wasn't convinced either.

    Gisle> Another problem is that there should have been some way to
    Gisle> specify these formatter parameters together with the -o
    Gisle> option in the "request" script.  Perhaps something like
    Gisle> this:

    Gisle>    request -o ps:papersize=letter;fontfamily=helvetica
    Gisle> 00whois.html

    Gisle> Can you think of a better way to do it?

I would suggest replace the ":" and ";" with whitespace and keep the "="

   request -o ps papersize=letter fontfamily=helvetica 00whois.html

looks more familiar to me. Now I see the problem: somebody has a
filename "fontfamily=helvetica". So this isn't really good enough. But
if "--" is recognized as the end of options, I'd prefer the white way.

This reminds me of a feature request I had in mind: STDIN as the
source isn't supported yet, would you like to add support for it?

    Gisle> --Gisle

I'm happy that you're not too deep buried in 'real work', regards,
andreas