Free plain text files software for linux

XML From Plain Text (xfpt) is a program that reads a file of plain text that contains relatively simple markup, and outputs an XML file. It is intended to simplify the management of XML data.
The project is not a program that attempts to turn a plain text document into XML. Markup within text is introduced by ampersand characters, but is otherwise "soft". You can define what follows the ampersand, for example, &" to generate a "quote" element. There is also a macro facility that allows for higher level concepts such as chapters, displays, tables, etc.
Enhancements:
- The macro library has been extended to include preface, appendix, colophon, footnote, figure, and table.
- The program has one new directive to enable it to handle "nested" sections such as footnotes.

PlainDoc (pd2tex) document production system allows you to write documents as normal text files. pd2tex tool converts the plain text files to:
- TeX which then gets converted to pdf (you need pdflatex tool installed)
- DocBook (dbx) which can be fed to various tool chains (not supplied) to generate pdf and html
- flat HTML (entire document in one HTML file)
- multipage HTML (each section as its own HTML file)
PlainDoc system was developed by Sampo Kellomaki from around 2002 onwards with the aim of solving document editing problems for writing:
- IT specifications documents
- software product manuals and documentation
- scientific and research papers
- legal documents
- presentation slides
Some of the goals were:
- document source is the plain text representation, no separate conversion needed
- documents are intuitive to write and understand
- getting a neophyte to a reasonable level of productivity and achievement should be easy. A college freshman should be able to use PlainDoc after 1 hour training, provided that all the tool chains have already been installed
- it must be very difficult to fatally corrupt a document; fixing corruption should be as simple as editing the file
- it must be possible to do diffs between versions of the document
- using cvs should be well supported (helps to avoid fatal loss of document, too)
- enable use of plain text productivity environments like emacs(1)
- the PlainDoc system MUST be serious enough to produce most any type of document and thus end the need to use any other system
- typeset quality output in paper and web formats
PlainDoc has now (Oct, 2004) been around for more than two years and it has been successfully used to produce:
- major IT specifications conforming to formatting rules (70 page range)
- research papers and theses conforming to formatting rules (200 page range)
- product manuals (500 page range)
- legal documents and contracts conforming to formatting rules
PlainDoc acknowledges its LaTeX legacy and does not aim at WYSIWYG (except in plain text document production, of course :-) however we are not totally against visual formatting either. Thus many hooks for accessing the underlying document formatters capabilities have been made available, such as:
- direct entry of TeX code
- direct entry of DocBook code
- direct entry of HTML code
These should allow you to get your job done without the system philosophy standing too much in the way, while for most part leveraging the automatic formatting of standard constructs.

Planner.el project is an Emacs organizer.

Planner.el is an organizer module for GNU Emacs and XEmacs. It tracks tasks, appointments, and notes in plain text files, which may be published via emacs-wiki.

planner.el is an Emacs module that gives me a summary view of my tasks, schedule, and notes inside Emacs (which incidentally has a nice graphical interface, too). Together with emacs-wiki.el, it lets me easily manage my website.

Another ultra-handy thing is M-x remember from remember.el, which pops up a buffer asking me what I want to remember and stores a note in my daily planner page. For example, this is one such note created by remember.el. A patch contributed by Thomas Gehrlein allows easy navigation of planner pages - simply select dates from M-x calendar.

Personally, I prefer this text-file-based system to Evolution or Korganizer. I remember dropping down to M-x grep to quickly search for something in my daily planner files. I can backup my data files in a .tar.gz. I can perform diffs and version control (although I havent gotten around to doing so yet!). I can even run it in conjunction with the Remembrance Agent.

Text::MetaText is a Perl extension implementing meta-language for processing "template" text files.

SYNOPSIS

use Text::MetaText;

my $mt = Text::MetaText->new();

# process file content or text string
print $mt->process_file($filename, %vardefs);
print $mt->process_text($textstring, %vardefs);

# pre-declare a BLOCK for subsequent INCLUDE
$mt->declare($textstring, $blockname);
$mt->declare(@content, $blockname);

SUMMARY OF METATEXT DIRECTIVES

%% DEFINE
variable1 = value # define variable(s)
variable2 = "quoted value"
%%

%% SUBST variable %% # insert variable value
%% variable %% # short form of above

%% BLOCK blockname %% # define a block blockname
block text...
%% ENDBLOCK %%

%% INCLUDE blockname %% # include blockname block text
%% INCLUDE filename %% # include external file filename

%% INCLUDE file_or_block # a more complete example...
variable = value # additional variable definition(s)
if = condition # conditional inclusion
unless = condition # conditional exclusion
format = format_string # printf-like format string with %s
filter = fltname(params) # post-process filter
%%

%% TIME # current system time, as per time(2)
format = format_string # display format, as per strftime(3C)
%%

EP3 Perl module is the Extensible Perl PreProcessor.

SYNOPSIS

# Use options and files from command-line
use Text::EP3;
[use Text::EP3::{Extension}] # Language Specific Modules
# create the PreProcessor object
my $preprocessor = new Text::EP3 file;
# do the preprocessing, using command-line options from @ARGV
$preprocessor->ep3_execute;

# Set options and files from the Perl script
use Text::EP3;
[use Text::EP3::{Extension}] # Language Specific Modules
# create the PreProcessor object
my $preprocessor = new Text::EP3 file;
# configure the PreProcessor object (optional)
$preprocessor->ep3_output_file([$filename]);
$preprocessor->ep3_modules([@modules]);
$preprocessor->ep3_includes([@include_directories]);
$preprocessor->ep3_reset;
$preprocessor->ep3_start_comment([$string]);
$preprocessor->ep3_end_comment([$string]);
$preprocessor->ep3_line_comment([$string]);
$preprocessor->ep3_delimiter([$string]);
$preprocessor->ep3_gen_depend_list([$value]);
$preprocessor->ep3_keep_comments([$value]);
$preprocessor->ep3_protect_comments([$value]);
$preprocessor->ep3_defines($string1=$string2);
# do the preprocessing
$preprocessor->ep3_process([$filename, [$condition]]);

EP3 is a Perl5 program that preprocesses STDIN or some set of input files and produces an output file. EP3 only works on input files and produces output files. It seems to me that if you want to preprocess arrays or somesuch, you should be using perl. EP3 was first developed to provide a flexible preprocessor for the Verilog hardware description language.

Verilog presents some problems that were not easily solved by using cpp or m4. I wanted to be able to use a normal preprocessor, but extend its functionality. So I wrote EP3 - the Extensible Perl PreProcessor. The main difference between EP3 and other preprocessors is its built-in extensibility. Every directive in EP3 is really a method defined in EP3, one of its submodules, or embedded in the file that is being processed. By linking the directive name to the associated methods, other methods could be added, thus extending the preprocessor.

HTML::TextToHTML is a Perl module that can convert plain text file to HTML.

SYNOPSIS

From the command line:

txt2html I< arguments >

From Scripts:

use HTML::TextToHTML;

# create a new object
my $conv = new HTML::TextToHTML();

# convert a file
$conv->txt2html(infile=>[$text_file],
outfile=>$html_file,
title=>"Wonderful Things",
mail=>1,
]);

# reset arguments
$conv->args(infile=>[], mail=>0);

# convert a string
$newstring = $conv->process_chunk($mystring)

HTML::TextToHTML converts plain text files to HTML. The txt2html script uses this module to do the same from the command-line.

It supports headings, tables, lists, simple character markup, and hyperlinking, and is highly customizable. It recognizes some of the apparent structure of the source document (mostly whitespace and typographic layout), and attempts to mark that structure explicitly using HTML. The purpose for this tool is to provide an easier way of converting existing text documents to HTML format, giving something nicer than just whapping the text into a big PRE block.

Apache::Pod::Text is a mod_perl handler to convert Pod to plain text.

SYNOPSIS

A simple mod_perl handler to easily convert Pod to Text.

CONFIGURATION

See Apache::Pod::HTML for configuration details.