Today’s exercise was to port the GMarkup Browser, an Objective-C program which comes with Renaissance, to Python. Using this allows you to see what various gmarkup files will look like when they are loaded, which is very handy as you’re developing a program’s UI, without having to build a program around them. The source code of Renaissance (available separately from the binary we installed a few entries ago) contains an Examples folder showing all of the tags in use, both as small toy examples and tests, and as full-fledged applications. It’s well worth downloading this and poking around in it with the Browser.  Read →

I’ll be presenting on Renaissance, OS X, and Python at the VanX meeting at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, December 16th. By then I should have a lot more programs and utilities to show.  Read →

Nicola Pera has done a great job building Renaissance, and has worked hard to document it well. The manual is clear and easy to follow, but is not complete yet. He invited me to help with the documentation, and I’ve found the source code easy enough to read that I might do that (Objective-C is actually quite Pythonic), but it’s been years since I’ve hacked LaTeX and I’d rather spend my time posting examples of working code. So for now I’ll just stick my notes here about the Renaissance elements which have not yet been documented in the manual.  Read →